Re: 2.4.12-ac4 10Mbit NE2k interrupt load kills p166

Samium Gromoff
2001-12-09T21:49:55Z

" Mark Hahn wrote:"
>
> > > I had an AMD K6 200 with an ISA NE2K card whan I started using Linux...
> ...
> > such broken behaviour.
>
> the only thing broken is that the nic is pitiful and eats CPU.
>
> > i`ve made a further research and discovered the fact that
> > ping -l 99999999 - does not corrupt the sound
> > ping -l 99999999 -s 256 - does not corrupt the sound
> > ping -l 99999999 -s 512 - significantly corrupts the sound
> > ping -l 99999999 -s 16384 - heavily corrupts the sound with stalls
>
> right, so more fragmentation-assembly increases the CPU load,
> no surprise there.
damn, i have a mtu of 1500 and i dont quite see abt what frag/reassembly
are you talking about while the problems start to pop out on _256_ bytes
large packets (yes 256+smth like 32 or more)
>
> > My thinking is that if 2.0 was better than 2.4 in this case, we definitely
> > need to find out why was it so and use its strong side.
>
> your particular case is not worth fixing; I doubt it applies to machines
> with modern CPU, modern dram, modern nics.
>
>
but why? 2.0 is ok, 2.4 is broken.

look: we have 2.0 serving NIC interrupts more efficintly than 2.4, and you
say that we even dont need to know _why_ its so!?

why do you neglect the possible improvement of that case?

cheers, Samium Gromoff