On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 01:53:11PM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 10:03:52PM +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 01:58:59PM -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2017-10-17 at 18:18 +0300, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> > > > From: Noa Osherovich <noaos-VPRAkNaXOzVWk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org>
> > > >
> > > > There are root complexes that are able to optimize their
> > > > performance when incoming data is multiple full cache lines.
> > > >
> > > > Scatter end padding is the device's ability to pad the ending of
> > > > incoming packets (scatter)
> > >
> > > I hate this naming.  I'm sure people inside of Mellanox have gotten
> > > used to it, but this feature really has no bearing on scatter/gather at
> > > all.  This is merely final write padding.  You might have a
> > > scatter/gather list, you might have a single buffer.  Either way, the
> > > PCI root complex couldn't care less about scatter/gather or not, it's
> > > all a byte stream to it.  I would be much happier with a name that
> > > reflected what this really does.
> >
> > Scatter has more broad meaning than "scatter/gather list". The name
> > here came from statistical meaning of "scatter", I'll try to come into
> > something more descriptive.
>
> I don't like it either.. We usually call this 'alignment padding' in CS.

We can return to our initial internal name - "RX end padding".
I'll consult with architecture tomorrow to hear their suggestion.

Thanks

>
> Jason