On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 10:58 +0100, Tore Anderson wrote: > The workaround I ended up with was to simply connect all four NICs and > join them together in a bonded ethernet device (LAG), making sure the > switch load-balanced incoming packets equally amongst all four LAG > members, and also use smp_affinity to make sure the intterupts for each > NIC is handled by separate CPUs. I'm guessing that would be the standard approach... don't know whether or not it is possible or advisable to balance soft IRQs > Anyway, now I'm considering getting a 10G aggregation switch and connect > the router to it. The high port cost of 10 GbE interfaces/switch ports > rules out using the same trick, so I was wondering if anyone else has > had a problem with this behaviour and found another way to deal with it, > that enables the full utilisation of a SMP system even if the router has > only one network interface? Some newer NICs (some of Intel's for instance) support several packet queues to make it possible to deal with just this problem. Check out http://lwn.net/Articles/289137/ for a start... It would be great if you'd let the list know of the results should you try to use one of the multiqueue NICs for a netfilter firewall, I for one am very curious... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netfilter" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
