Re: [PATCH 5/6]: powerpc/cell spidernet bottom half

Arnd Bergmann
2006-08-18T23:03:19Z

On Saturday 19 August 2006 00:26, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> The recent set of low-waterark patches for the spider result in a
> significant amount of computing being done in an interrupt context.
> This patch moves this to a "bottom half" aka work queue, so that
> the code runs in a normal kernel context. Curiously, this seems to
> result in a performance boost of about 5% for large packets.

I guess this one still needs some work. We already have a bottom
half mechanism in the network layer, using the NAPI poll function
that is strongly serialized.

Linas, you wrote that you have tried doing the TX descriptor cleanup
in dev->poll(), but I think you missed the point that this function
needs should then be scheduled whenever necessary.

This seems a little strange, but I think what we need to do is in the
low-watermark interrupt call netif_rx_schedule(netdev) in order to
arrange for the ->poll function to be called in the next softirq.

Someone should probably document that in
Documentation/networking/NAPI_HOWTO.txt, I might end up doing that
once we get it right for spidernet.