Re: [PATCH v5] net: ethernet: add driver for Aurora VLSI NB8800 Ethernet controller

[David Miller]

From: Måns Rullgård <mans@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 12:22:28 +0000

> David Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
>> From: Måns Rullgård <mans@xxxxxxxxx>
>> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 00:40:09 +0000
>>
>>> When the DMA complete interrupt arrives, the next chain should be
>>> kicked off as quickly as possible, and I don't see why that would
>>> benefit from being done in napi context.
>>
>> NAPI isn't about low latency, it's about fairness and interrupt
>> mitigation.
>>
>> You probably don't even realize that all of the TX SKB freeing you do
>> in the hardware interrupt handler end up being actually processed by a
>> scheduled software interrupt anyways.
>>
>> So you are gaining almost nothing by not doing TX completion in NAPI
>> context, whereas by doing so you would be gaining a lot including
>> more simplified locking or even the ability to do no locking at all.
> 
> TX completion is separate from restarting the DMA, and moving that to
> NAPI may well be a good idea.  Should I simply napi_schedule() if the
> hardware indicates TX is complete and do the cleanup in the NAPI poll
> function?

... just like every other high end driver... Yes.
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