On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 11:26:26PM -0700, David Miller wrote: > > I don't think it will be worthwhile to keep NAPI around just for > TX completion. Sure the dev_kfree_skb() will schedule software > interrupt work to do the actual free, but the TX ring walking > and dev_kfree_skb() calls will be in hard IRQ context.
Sure we won't need all of NAPI. But would it be that bad to schedule a tasklet to do the TX completion? > > > The only regret I have about that is we will go back to not being able > > > to profile ->hard_start_xmit() very well in such drivers. > > > > Can you elborate on that? I think I've already removed all references > > to this in my memory :) > > If you disable IRQs in the ->hard_start_xmit() handler, you don't > get timer based profiling ticks. Currently we do. Oh, I'm not proposing that we disable IRQs on xmit_lock at all. What I'm saying is that for tg3, since both xmit_lock and tx_lock are BH- disabling locks, they are equivalent and therefore we can replace tx_lock with xmit_lock. For other lockless NICs that have IRQ disabling tx_locks, they can be converted to BH-disabling ones and then be able to use xmit_lock. Cheers, -- Visit Openswan at http://www.openswan.org/ Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
