path: root/Documentation/networking/ena.txt

Linux kernel driver for Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) family:
=============================================================

Overview:
=========
ENA is a networking interface designed to make good use of modern CPU
features and system architectures.

The ENA device exposes a lightweight management interface with a
minimal set of memory mapped registers and extendable command set
through an Admin Queue.

The driver supports a range of ENA devices, is link-speed independent
(i.e., the same driver is used for 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, etc.), and has
a negotiated and extendable feature set.

Some ENA devices support SR-IOV. This driver is used for both the
SR-IOV Physical Function (PF) and Virtual Function (VF) devices.

ENA devices enable high speed and low overhead network traffic
processing by providing multiple Tx/Rx queue pairs (the maximum number
is advertised by the device via the Admin Queue), a dedicated MSI-X
interrupt vector per Tx/Rx queue pair, adaptive interrupt moderation,
and CPU cacheline optimized data placement.

The ENA driver supports industry standard TCP/IP offload features such
as checksum offload and TCP transmit segmentation offload (TSO).
Receive-side scaling (RSS) is supported for multi-core scaling.

The ENA driver and its corresponding devices implement health
monitoring mechanisms such as watchdog, enabling the device and driver
to recover in a manner transparent to the application, as well as
debug logs.

Some of the ENA devices support a working mode called Low-latency
Queue (LLQ), which saves several more microseconds.

Supported PCI vendor ID/device IDs:
===================================
1d0f:0ec2 - ENA PF
1d0f:1ec2 - ENA PF with LLQ support
1d0f:ec20 - ENA VF
1d0f:ec21 - ENA VF with LLQ support

ENA Source Code Directory Structure:
====================================
ena_com.[ch]      - Management communication layer. This layer is
                    responsible for the handling all the management
                    (admin) communication between the device and the
                    driver.
ena_eth_com.[ch]  - Tx/Rx data path.
ena_admin_defs.h  - Definition of ENA management interface.
ena_eth_io_defs.h - Definition of ENA data path interface.
ena_common_defs.h - Common definitions for ena_com layer.
ena_regs_defs.h   - Definition of ENA PCI memory-mapped (MMIO) registers.
ena_netdev.[ch]   - Main Linux kernel driver.
ena_syfsfs.[ch]   - Sysfs files.
ena_ethtool.c     - ethtool callbacks.
ena_pci_id_tbl.h  - Supported device IDs.

Management Interface:
=====================
ENA management interface is exposed by means of:
- PCIe Configuration Space
- Device Registers
- Admin Queue (AQ) and Admin Completion Queue (ACQ)
- Asynchronous Event Notification Queue (AENQ)

ENA device MMIO Registers are accessed only during driver
initialization and are not involved in further normal device
operation.

AQ is used for submitting management commands, and the
results/responses are reported asynchronously through ACQ.

ENA introduces a very small set of management commands with room for
vendor-specific extensions. Most of the management operations are
framed in a generic Get/Set feature command.

The following admin queue commands are supported:
- Create I/O submission queue
- Create I/O completion queue
- Destroy I/O submission queue
- Destroy I/O completion queue
- Get feature
- Set feature
- Configure AENQ
- Get statistics

Refer to ena_admin_defs.h for the list of supported Get/Set Feature
properties.

The Asynchronous Event Notification Queue (AENQ) is a uni-directional
queue used by the ENA device to send to the driver events that cannot
be reported using ACQ. AENQ events are subdivided into groups. Each
group may have multiple syndromes, as shown below

The events are:
	Group			Syndrome
	Link state change	- X -
	Fatal error		- X -
	Notification		Suspend traffic
	Notification		Resume traffic
	Keep-Alive		- X -

ACQ and AENQ share the same MSI-X vector.

Keep-Alive is a special mechanism that allows monitoring of the
device's health. The driver maintains a watchdog (WD) handler which,
if fired, logs the current state and statistics then resets and
restarts the ENA device and driver. A Keep-Alive event is delivered by
the device every second. The driver re-arms the WD upon reception of a
Keep-Alive event. A missed Keep-Alive event causes the WD handler to
fire.

Data Path Interface:
====================
I/O operations are based on Tx and Rx Submission Queues (Tx SQ and Rx
SQ correspondingly). Each SQ has a completion queue (CQ) associated
with it.

The SQs and CQs are implemented as descriptor rings in contiguous
physical memory.

The ENA driver supports two Queue Operation modes for Tx SQs:
- Regular mode
  * In this mode the Tx SQs reside in the host's memory. The ENA
    device fetches the ENA Tx descriptors and packet data from host
    memory.
- Low Latency Queue (LLQ) mode or "push-mode".
  * In this mode the driver pushes the transmit descriptors and the
    first 128 bytes of the packet directly to the ENA device memory
    space. The rest of the packet payload is fetched by the
    device. For this operation mode, the driver uses a dedicated PCI
    device memory BAR, which is mapped with write-combine capability.

The Rx SQs support only the regular mode.

Note: Not all ENA devices support LLQ, and this feature is negotiated
      with the device upon initialization. If the ENA device does not
      support LLQ mode, the driver falls back to the regular mode.

The driver supports multi-queue for both Tx and Rx. This has various
benefits:
- Reduced CPU/thread/process contention on a given Ethernet interface.
- Cache miss rate on completion is reduced, particularly for data
  cache lines that hold the sk_buff structures.
- Increased process-level parallelism when handling received packets.
- Increased data cache hit rate, by steering kernel processing of
  packets to the CPU, where the application thread consuming the
  packet is running.
- In hardware interrupt re-direction.

Interrupt Modes:
================
The driver assigns a single MSI-X vector per queue pair (for both Tx
and Rx directions). The driver assigns an additional dedicated MSI-X vector
for management (for ACQ and AENQ).

Management interrupt registration is performed when the Linux kernel
probes the adapter, and it is de-registered when the adapter is
removed. I/O queue interrupt registration is performed when the Linux
interface of the adapter is opened, and it is de-registered when the
interface is closed.

The management interrupt is named:
   ena-mgmnt@pci:<PCI domain:bus:slot.function>
and for each queue pair, an interrupt is named:
   <interface name>-Tx-Rx-<queue index>

The ENA device operates in auto-mask and auto-clear interrupt
modes. That is, once MSI-X is delivered to the host, its Cause bit is
automatically cleared and the interrupt is masked. The interrupt is
unmasked by the driver after NAPI processing is complete.

Interrupt Moderation:
=====================
ENA driver and device can operate in conventional or adaptive interrupt
moderation mode.

In conventional mode the driver instructs device to postpone interrupt
posting according to static interrupt delay value. The interrupt delay
value can be configured through ethtool(8). The following ethtool
parameters are supported by the driver: tx-usecs, rx-usecs

In adaptive interrupt moderation mode the interrupt delay value is
updated by the driver dynamically and adjusted every NAPI cycle
according to the traffic nature.

By default ENA driver applies adaptive coalescing on Rx traffic and
conventional coalescing on Tx traffic.

Adaptive coalescing can be switched on/off through ethtool(8)
adaptive_rx on|off parameter.

The driver chooses interrupt delay value according to the number of
bytes and packets received between interrupt unmasking and interrupt
posting. The driver uses interrupt delay table that subdivides the
range of received bytes/packets into 5 levels and assigns interrupt
delay value to each level.

The user can enable/disable adaptive moderation, modify the interrupt
delay table and restore its default values through sysfs.

The rx_copybreak is initialized by default to ENA_DEFAULT_RX_COPYBREAK
and can be configured by the ETHTOOL_STUNABLE command of the
SIOCETHTOOL ioctl.

SKB:
The driver-allocated SKB for frames received from Rx handling using
NAPI context. The allocation method depends on the size of the packet.
If the frame length is larger than rx_copybreak, napi_get_frags()
is used, otherwise netdev_alloc_skb_ip_align() is used, the buffer
content is copied (by CPU) to the SKB, and the buffer is recycled.

Statistics:
===========
The user can obtain ENA device and driver statistics using ethtool.
The driver can collect regular or extended statistics (including
per-queue stats) from the device.

In addition the driver logs the stats to syslog upon device reset.

MTU:
====
The driver supports an arbitrarily large MTU with a maximum that is
negotiated with the device. The driver configures MTU using the
SetFeature command (ENA_ADMIN_MTU property). The user can change MTU
via ip(8) and similar legacy tools.

Stateless Offloads:
===================
The ENA driver supports:
- TSO over IPv4/IPv6
- TSO with ECN
- IPv4 header checksum offload
- TCP/UDP over IPv4/IPv6 checksum offloads

RSS:
====
- The ENA device supports RSS that allows flexible Rx traffic
  steering.
- Toeplitz and CRC32 hash functions are supported.
- Different combinations of L2/L3/L4 fields can be configured as
  inputs for hash functions.
- The driver configures RSS settings using the AQ SetFeature command
  (ENA_ADMIN_RSS_HASH_FUNCTION, ENA_ADMIN_RSS_HASH_INPUT and
  ENA_ADMIN_RSS_REDIRECTION_TABLE_CONFIG properties).
- If the NETIF_F_RXHASH flag is set, the 32-bit result of the hash
  function delivered in the Rx CQ descriptor is set in the received
  SKB.
- The user can provide a hash key, hash function, and configure the
  indirection table through ethtool(8).

DATA PATH:
==========
Tx:
---
end_start_xmit() is called by the stack. This function does the following:
- Maps data buffers (skb->data and frags).
- Populates ena_buf for the push buffer (if the driver and device are
  in push mode.)
- Prepares ENA bufs for the remaining frags.
- Allocates a new request ID from the empty req_id ring. The request
  ID is the index of the packet in the Tx info. This is used for
  out-of-order TX completions.
- Adds the packet to the proper place in the Tx ring.
- Calls ena_com_prepare_tx(), an ENA communication layer that converts
  the ena_bufs to ENA descriptors (and adds meta ENA descriptors as
  needed.)
  * This function also copies the ENA descriptors and the push buffer
    to the Device memory space (if in push mode.)
- Writes doorbell to the ENA device.
- When the ENA device finishes sending the packet, a completion
  interrupt is raised.
- The interrupt handler schedules NAPI.
- The ena_clean_tx_irq() function is called. This function handles the
  completion descriptors generated by the ENA, with a single
  completion descriptor per completed packet.
  * req_id is retrieved from the completion descriptor. The tx_info of
    the packet is retrieved via the req_id. The data buffers are
    unmapped and req_id is returned to the empty req_id ring.
  * The function stops when the completion descriptors are completed or
    the budget is reached.

Rx:
---
- When a packet is received from the ENA device.
- The interrupt handler schedules NAPI.
- The ena_clean_rx_irq() function is called. This function calls
  ena_rx_pkt(), an ENA communication layer function, which returns the
  number of descriptors used for a new unhandled packet, and zero if
  no new packet is found.
- Then it calls the ena_clean_rx_irq() function.
- ena_eth_rx_skb() checks packet length:
  * If the packet is small (len < rx_copybreak), the driver allocates
    a SKB for the new packet, and copies the packet payload into the
    SKB data buffer.
    - In this way the original data buffer is not passed to the stack
      and is reused for future Rx packets.
  * Otherwise the function unmaps the Rx buffer, then allocates the
    new SKB structure and hooks the Rx buffer to the SKB frags.
- The new SKB is updated with the necessary information (protocol,
  checksum hw verify result, etc.), and then passed to the network
  stack, using the NAPI interface function napi_gro_receive().