Re: Allocation of sk_buffs in the kernel

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@conectiva.com.br>]

Em Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 05:14:56AM +0200, Andi Kleen escreveu:
> [1] There may be a few unnormal ones that do; e.g. vendor driver
> writers seem to frequently try to reuse skbuffs privately because they're
> used to that from other OS. It is discouraged and somewhat tricky, but
> possible.

The original 802.2 stack from procom, used frame_t all over the core stack,
with only the entry/exit points manipulating skb's. On entry from the core
networking stack and from upper protocols (NetBEUI in procom case) they
allocated a frame_t from a pool and initialited pointers to the mac and llc
headers and stored the skb type in another frame_t member, pointing to the
skb memory and used those pointers instead of skb->h and skb->nh.  That
way, I think, they could use the core for several OSes.

Maybe Jens should use something like WAITQUEUE_DEBUG if he want to know
where alloc_skb and friends were called, see include/linux/wait.h 8)

- Arnaldo