On some devices that only support static rate fallback tables sending rate
control probing packets can be really expensive.
Probing lower rates can already hurt throughput quite a bit. What hurts even
more is the fact that on mt76x0/mt76x2, single probing packets can only be
forced by directing packets at a different internal hardware queue, which
causes some heavy reordering and extra latency.
The reordering issue is mainly problematic while pushing lots of packets to
a particular station. If there is little activity, the overhead of probing is
neglegible.
The static fallback behavior is designed to pretty much only handle rate
control algorithms that use only a very limited set of rates on which the
algorithm switches up/down based on packet error rate.
In order to better support that kind of hardware, this patch implements a
different approach to rate probing where it switches to a slightly higher rate,
waits for tx status feedback, then updates the stats and switches back to
the new max throughput rate. This only triggers above a packet rate of 100
per stats interval (~50ms).
For that kind of probing, the code has to reduce the set of probing rates
a lot more compared to single packet probing, so it uses only one packet
per MCS group which is either slightly faster, or as close as possible to
the max throughput rate.
This allows switching between similar rates with different numbers of
streams. The algorithm assumes that the hardware will work its way lower
within an MCS group in case of retransmissions, so that lower rates don't
have to be probed by the high packets per second rate probing code.
To further reduce the search space, it also does not probe rates with lower
channel bandwidth than the max throughput rate.
At the moment, these changes will only affect mt76x0/mt76x2.
Signed-off-by: Felix Fietkau <nbd@nbd.name>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20190820095449.45255-4-nbd@nbd.name
Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
48cb39522a