From: Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 8 May 2008 11:22:08 +0800 > On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 03:48:06PM +0200, Michael Buesch wrote: > > > > So there's no way to actually fail in a TX handler? Drivers > > are doomed to drop the packet, if they cannot handle it due to > > ring overflow? > > You're supposed to stop the queue before the ring overflows. Right, and this is why drivers choose a TX wakeup threshold such that they can accept an arbitrarily sized TSO frame. For example, from drivers/net/tg3.c's ->hard_start_xmit(): if (unlikely(tg3_tx_avail(tp) <= (MAX_SKB_FRAGS + 1))) { netif_stop_queue(dev); if (tg3_tx_avail(tp) > TG3_TX_WAKEUP_THRESH(tp)) netif_wake_queue(tp->dev); } The driver is responsible for stopping the queue _before_ it enters a state where there is not enough space in the queue to accept a packet. This is why most drivers make the following kind of BUG check at the start of their ->hard_start_xmit() if (unlikely(tg3_tx_avail(tp) <= (skb_shinfo(skb)->nr_frags + 1))) { if (!netif_queue_stopped(dev)) { netif_stop_queue(dev); /* This is a hard error, log it. */ printk(KERN_ERR PFX "%s: BUG! Tx Ring full when " "queue awake!\n", dev->name); } return NETDEV_TX_BUSY; } -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html