When using short intervals e.g. below one millisecond, large packets won't be
transmitted at all. The software implementations checks whether the packet can
be fit into the remaining interval. Therefore, it takes the packet length and
the transmission speed into account. That is correct.
However, for large packets it may be that the transmission time exceeds the
interval resulting in no packet transmission. The same situation works fine with
hardware offloading applied.
The problem has been observed with the following schedule and iperf3:
|root@tsn:~# iperf3 -c 192.168.2.105
|Connecting to host 192.168.2.105, port 5201
|[ 5] local 192.168.2.121 port 52610 connected to 192.168.2.105 port 5201
|[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr Cwnd
|[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 45.2 KBytes 370 Kbits/sec 0 1.41 KBytes
|[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 0.00 Bytes 0.00 bits/sec 0 1.41 KBytes
After debugging, it seems that the packet length stored in the SKB is about
7000-8000 bytes. Using a 100 Mbit/s link the transmission time is about 600us
which larger than the interval of 500us.
Therefore, segment the SKB into smaller chunks if the packet is too big. This
yields similar results than the hardware offload: