Re: Linux laptop with native XDP support

On 08/09/2021 08.38, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 07, 2021 at 06:50:49PM -0700, Jose Fernandez wrote:
>>> Nope, no XDP support for WiFi. There was some exploratory discussion
>>> about that some years ago, but XDP has Ethernet as a pretty fundamental
>>> assumption so it's not an obvious fit to the Linux WiFi stack...
>>>
>>> -Toke
>>>
>>
>> I came to the realization about that a few hours after sending this
>> email. I found this link useful to identity which drivers support XDP:
>> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/A/ident/bpf_prog_run_xdp
>>
>> I had my eyes on the latest gen "slim" Linux notebooks (Lenovo XC1,
>> Dell XPS), but these don't have built-in Ethernet anymore. So I'm back
>> to the drawing board. Thanks for the tip on ixgbe and Broadcom.
> 
> Note that e1000e remains quite popular among notebooks (my last HP one
> and the two following thinkpads including the T480s I'm typing on have
> this), and there is common ancestry between e1000e and igb. When I
> implemented the NDIV framework (which basically does pretty similar
> things as XDP does in the drivers), I managed to implement e1000,
> e1000e, igb and ixgbe without too many difficulties. Maybe it could
> be a good opportunity for you to try to port XDP to e1000e using such
> a machine, by looking at the work from igb ?

The igb + igc drivers support native XDP, and I assume they must be in 
some laptops.

You can deduce that hardware support / Intel marketing names via e.g. 
the igb driver via looking at the pci_device_id table (igb_pci_tbl[1]):

  [1] 
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.14/source/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/igb/igb_main.c#L63

I agree that it would be beneficial to add native XDP to e1000e.

AFAIK John Fastabend implemented XDP for e1000, but the patch had some 
bug (report-ably for some old hardware) that we never identified. Thus, 
the patch was dropped.

--Jesper