Hi,
I'm working for Mellanox on mlx4_en NIC driver.
We need to be able to be notified on irq affinity changes.
This is because, during non-stop full bandwidth traffic, napi will poll
constantly and no interrupt will be fired. Because of that, even if the
user changes the irq affinity, polling will continue to be done on the
original CPU that was chosen on the first packet.
We would like to be notified when the affinity is changed. When such an
event happen, the driver will arm the interrupts and end the napi
session. An interrupt will start a new napi session on the right CPU.
In order to do that, I need to add a new irq affinity notification
callback (In addition to the existing cpu_rmap notification). For that I
would like to extend irq_set_affinity_notifier() to have a notifier
call-chain instead of a single notifier callback.
I wanted to hear your opinion on this, and unless there is a better
solution, will send an RFC later on.
References:
- http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/65244/ - Review done by Thomas
Glexiber to Ben Hutchings first version of the irq affinity notifiers.
- http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/79593/ - Final version of
irq_set_affinity_notifier() that was applied
Thanks,
Amir