NE2000 slow interrupts safe?

Richard Gooch (rgooch@workaholix.atnf.CSIRO.AU)
Thu, 16 Apr 1998 16:49:08 +1000

Hi, all. Looking at the code for the NE2000 driver, I note that the
interrupt is registered as a fast interrupt. I'm trying to convince
people here to change from pSOS to Linux. A problem they have is
that the NE2000 interrupt service routine takes up to 2
milliseconds. This blocks another interrupt from a custom card for too
long (it interrupts every millisecond), causing them to loose
interrupts.

I've instrumented the Linux NE2000 interrupt handler, and I see that
almost all the time is taken in transferring the data from the card
memory to RAM (the card is on an ISA bus). I did the measurements on a
Pentium 90 MHz.

So my question is whether it is safe to re-enable other interrupts in
the Linux NE2000 interrupt handler?

Regards,

Richard....

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