Re: Today Linus redesigns the networking driver interface (was Re: tulip driver in ...)
Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Wed, 23 Sep 1998 09:57:34 +1000
Theodore Y. Ts'o writes:
> Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 09:23:29 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
>
> (Aggregation tends to be bad for latency, which is why it's hard: there
> needs to be some way for the interrupt handler to tell the system that "I
> want bh's run _now_, because I got an important packet or I'm close to
> filling up the queues").
>
> I don't know if it's really worth pursuing, though.
>
> This would be really nice for SLIP/PPP processing. We could have the
> drivers only run the BH when a SLIP or PPP framing character was
> processed. This gives us the benefits of aggregation without the
> downside of latency, since we kick the BH at exactly the right time ---
> when we've gotten a full packet worth of data, and can send it to the
> network layer.
>
> Furthermore, it shouldn't be that hard to have interrupt drivers return
> a flag indicating whether BH's should run now or not. It's something
> that would be really nice for 2.3.
I don't understand why selectively marking/not marking a BH doesn't
give you what you want.
Regards,
Richard....
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