net: dsa: sja1105: Always send through management routes in slot 0

I finally found out how the 4 management route slots are supposed to
be used, but.. it's not worth it.

The description from the comment I've just deleted in this commit is
still true: when more than 1 management slot is active at the same time,
the switch will match frames incoming [from the CPU port] on the lowest
numbered management slot that matches the frame's DMAC.

My issue was that one was not supposed to statically assign each port a
slot. Yes, there are 4 slots and also 4 non-CPU ports, but that is a
mere coincidence.

Instead, the switch can be used like this: every management frame gets a
slot at the right of the most recently assigned slot:

Send mgmt frame 1 through S0:    S0 x  x  x
Send mgmt frame 2 through S1:    S0 S1 x  x
Send mgmt frame 3 through S2:    S0 S1 S2 x
Send mgmt frame 4 through S3:    S0 S1 S2 S3

The difference compared to the old usage is that the transmission of
frames 1-4 doesn't need to wait until the completion of the management
route. It is safe to use a slot to the right of the most recently used
one, because by protocol nobody will program a slot to your left and
"steal" your route towards the correct egress port.

So there is a potential throughput benefit here.

But mgmt frame 5 has no more free slot to use, so it has to wait until
_all_ of S0, S1, S2, S3 are full, in order to use S0 again.

And that's actually exactly the problem: I was looking for something
that would bring more predictable transmission latency, but this is
exactly the opposite: 3 out of 4 frames would be transmitted quicker,
but the 4th would draw the short straw and have a worse worst-case
latency than before.

Useless.

Things are made even worse by PTP TX timestamping, which is something I
won't go deeply into here. Suffice to say that the fact there is a
driver-level lock on the SPI bus offsets any potential throughput gains
that parallelism might bring.

So there's no going back to the multi-slot scheme, remove the
"mgmt_slot" variable from sja1105_port and the dummy static assignment
made at probe time.

While passing by, also remove the assignment to casc_port altogether.
Don't pretend that we support cascaded setups.

Signed-off-by: Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/dsa/sja1105.h b/include/linux/dsa/sja1105.h
index c0b6a603ea8c..317e05b2584b 100644
--- a/include/linux/dsa/sja1105.h
+++ b/include/linux/dsa/sja1105.h
@@ -56,7 +56,6 @@ struct sja1105_port {
 	struct sja1105_tagger_data *data;
 	struct dsa_port *dp;
 	bool hwts_tx_en;
-	int mgmt_slot;
 };
 
 #endif /* _NET_DSA_SJA1105_H */