Re: CONFIG_IRQBALANCE for AMD64?

Jeff Garzik
2004-05-28T20:00:57Z

Nivedita Singhvi wrote:
> I see networking interrupts requiring fine granularity
> balancing, to avoid the potential for dropped packets and
> long latencies. That is, given a busy server that is
> seeing a lot of interrupts, fair distribution of the
> interrupts is required within a very small amount of time,
> and we cannot require a user space daemon that parses the /proc
> file system and applies a policy and then rebinds irqs
> to different CPUs to run with that frequency.

Network is one of the areas where you _don't_ want to be constantly
pointing your NIC's irq to different CPUs.

Cache affinity, packet re-ordering problems, and other fun ensue.

Jeff