> BTW, what's the idea behind scatter/gather? > What do you benefit from keeping the buffer in different places??? AFAIK, it makes zero copy network transmission possible. Normally user space buffers may be scattered. If for example an ethernet device doesnt support it, kernel combines them together so as to make a one big chunk. This is expensive. But if the device and the driver of it supports scatter/gather I/O, then page table entries are created in the kernel space pointing user space buffers. Thus you avoid it copying them. -- Bora SAHIN -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
