Re: questions on NAPI processing latency and dropped network packets

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Tue Jan 15 2008 - 09:47:53 EST


Jarek Poplawski wrote:

IMHO, checking this with a current stable, which probably you are going
to do some day, anyway, should be 100% acceptable: giving some input to
netdev, while still working for yourself.

While I would love to do this, it's not that simple.

Some of our hardware is not supported on mainline, so we need per-kernel version patches to even bring up the blade. The blades netboot via a jumbo-frame network, so kernel extensions are needed to handle setting the MTU before mounting the rootfs. The blade in question uses CKRM which doesn't exist for newer kernels so the problem may simply be hidden by scheduling differences. The userspace application uses other kernel features that are not in mainline (and likely some of them won't ever be in mainline--I know because I've tried).

Basically, the number of changes required for our environment makes it difficult to just boot up the latest kernel.

Chris
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