NIC Driver Debugging & Optimisation Masterclass

High-Performance Networking & Cloud-Native · 30 illustrated lessons (text/HTML)

Outcomes

• Trace packets from the socket layer down to the NIC
• Find memory, DMA, interrupt and hardware faults in drivers
• Tune NICs with GRO/GSO, RSS and interrupt affinity

Where we teach this

• NET-101 · Linux Network Stack Architecture & Sockets live cohort

The lessons

Every lesson in this curriculum, in the order we teach it.

• 1Course introduction
• 2The Linux network stack in depth
• 3Core architecture overview
• 4Development and debugging environment setup
• 5Driver module basics
• 6NIC device initialisation explained
• 7Receive (Rx) path explained in depth
• 8Transmit (Tx) path explained in depth
• 9Kernel debugging toolkit, part 1: printk, dynamic debug, procfs and sysfs
• 10Kernel debugging toolkit, part 2
• 11Performance analysis tools
• 12Network-specific debugging tools explained
• 13Debugging memory and DMA problems
• 14Debugging interrupt and concurrency problems
• 15Hardware-related debugging
• 16Performance bottleneck analysis (part 1)
• 17Performance bottleneck analysis (part 2)
• 18Receive-side optimisation: GRO, LRO and RPS
• 19Transmit-side optimisation: GSO, TSO and XPS
• 20Zero-copy and bypass techniques
• 21Multi-queue and load balancing: RSS, Flow Director and IRQ affinity
• 22Driver optimisation in virtualised environments
• 23Advanced traffic control: QoS and the tc framework
• 24Power consumption and power management
• 25Driver code quality and maintenance
• 26Case study 1: debugging and tuning Intel 1G/10G wired NIC drivers
• 27Case study 2: common Wi-Fi driver issues and tuning with the mac80211 framework
• 28Case study 3: high-performance networking in cloud-native settings
• 29Automated testing and continuous integration: a kernel networking test suite
• 30Summary and outlook