net: cdc_ncm: Reduce memory use when kernel memory low

The CDC-NCM driver can require large amounts of memory to create
skb's and this can be a problem when the memory becomes fragmented.

This especially affects embedded systems that have constrained
resources but wish to maximise the throughput of CDC-NCM with 16KiB
NTB's.

The issue is after running for a while the kernel memory can become
fragmented and it needs compacting.
If the NTB allocation is needed before the memory has been compacted
the atomic allocation can fail which can cause increased latency,
large re-transmissions or disconnections depending upon the data
being transmitted at the time.
This situation occurs for less than a second until the kernel has
compacted the memory but the failed devices can take a lot longer to
recover from the failed TX packets.

To ease this temporary situation I modified the CDC-NCM TX path to
temporarily switch into a reduced memory mode which allocates an NTB
that will fit into a USB_CDC_NCM_NTB_MIN_OUT_SIZE (default 2048 Bytes)
sized memory block and only transmit NTB's with a single network frame
until the memory situation is resolved.
Each time this issue occurs we wait for an increasing number of
reduced size allocations before requesting a full size one to not
put additional pressure on a low memory system.

Once the memory is compacted the CDC-NCM data can resume transmitting
at the normal tx_max rate once again.

Signed-off-by: Jim Baxter <jim_baxter@mentor.com>
Reviewed-by: Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/usb/cdc_ncm.h b/include/linux/usb/cdc_ncm.h
index 00d232406f18..021f7a88f52c 100644
--- a/include/linux/usb/cdc_ncm.h
+++ b/include/linux/usb/cdc_ncm.h
@@ -117,6 +117,9 @@ struct cdc_ncm_ctx {
 	u32 tx_curr_frame_num;
 	u32 rx_max;
 	u32 tx_max;
+	u32 tx_curr_size;
+	u32 tx_low_mem_max_cnt;
+	u32 tx_low_mem_val;
 	u32 max_datagram_size;
 	u16 tx_max_datagrams;
 	u16 tx_remainder;