On Thu, 13 May 2004, Pantelis Antoniou wrote: > Is there a mechanism that I get retreive packets already pending in the > transmit queue so that I can fill the free hardware buffer from within the > transmit interrupt handler? Do you really have such small hardware buffers that the softirq scheduling latency is significant? Most devices hava a transmit ring buffer or similar which absorbs this latency by buffering more than one packet. As long as the buffer is refilled before it is completely drained you are fine from a performance point of view, and doing it more often only adds overhead. In general it is adviceable to have the hardware IRQ handlers do as little as possible as these block all other activity including many other hardware IRQs and leave the bulk of the work to softirq handlers. If you really need to have the hardware IRQ refill your buffers you can always extend the packet queue within your driver by adding a in-memory ring buffer or similar which can safely be polled by the interrupt handler, but I am afraid this will only increase the overhead of your driver for little or no performance gain only making your driver more complex. But you know the properties of your hardware device better than me.. Regards Henrik - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
