[Bug 1836635] Re: Bionic: support for Solarflare X2542 network adapter (sfc driver)

[Launchpad Bug Tracker]

** Branch linked: lp:~ubuntu-core-dev/debian-installer/bionic-proposed

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1836635

Title:
  Bionic: support for Solarflare X2542 network adapter (sfc driver)

Status in debian-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in linux package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid
Status in debian-installer source package in Bionic:
  Fix Committed
Status in linux source package in Bionic:
  Fix Released
Status in debian-installer source package in Cosmic:
  Invalid
Status in linux source package in Cosmic:
  Invalid
Status in debian-installer source package in Disco:
  Invalid
Status in linux source package in Disco:
  Invalid
Status in debian-installer source package in Eoan:
  Invalid
Status in linux source package in Eoan:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  [Impact]

   * Support for Solarflare X2542 network adapter
     (Medford2 / SFC9250) in the Bionic sfc driver.

   * This network adapter is present on recent hardware,
     at least HP 2019 and Dell PowerEdge R740xd systems.

   * On recent-hardware deployments that would rather use
     the Bionic LTS / GA supported kernel and cannot move
     to HWE kernels this adapter is non functional at all.

  [Test Case]

   * The X2542 adapter has been exercised with iperf3 and nc
     across 2 hosts on 25G link speed w/ MTUs 1400/1500/9000
     on both directions, for 1 week.

     Its performance is on par with the Cosmic 4.18 kernel
     (which contains all these patches) and the out-of-tree
     driver from the vendor.

   * The 7000 series adapter (for regression testing an old model,
     supported previously) has been exercised with iperf and netperf
     (TCP_STREAM, UDP_STREAM, TCP_RR, UDP_RR, and TCP_CRR) in one
     host (client/server in different adapter ports isolated with
     network namespaces, so traffic goes through the network switch),
     on 10G link speed on MTUs 1500/9000, for 1 weekend.

     No regressions observed between the original and test kernels.

  [Regression Potential]

   * The patchset touches a lot of the sfc driver, so the potential
     for regression definitely exists. Thus, a lot of consideration
     and testing happened:

   * It has been tested on other adapter which uses the old code,
     and no regressions were found so far (see 7000 series above).

   * The patchset is exclusively cherry-picks, no single backport.

   * The patchset essentially moves the Bionic driver up in the
     upstream 'git log --oneline -- drivers/net/ethernet/sfc/':

     - since commit d4a7a8893d4c ("sfc: pass valid pointers from efx_enqueue_unwind")
     - until commit 7f61e6c6279b ("sfc: support FEC configuration through ethtool")
     - except for 2 commits (not needed / unrelated)
       - commit 42356d9a137b ("sfc: support RSS spreading of ethtool ntuple filters")
       - commit 9baeb5eb1f83 ("sfc: falcon: remove duplicated bit-wise or of LOOPBACK_SGMII")
     - plus 2 more recent commits (fixes)
       - commit 458bd99e4974 ("sfc: remove ctpio_dmabuf_start from stats")
       - commit 0c235113b3c4 ("sfc: stop the TX queue before pushing new buffers")

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