From: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 13:34:36 -0700 > On Mon, 2015-05-18 at 12:19 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: >> So this one kind of fell through the cracks, partly because I don't >> exactly love the patch. >> >> What is it that keeps re-arming the softirq pending bit all the time? >> You mention the ath9k driver.. >> >> Also, do we really need the jiffies-based one at all? Maybe we should >> just get rid of that entirely, if it's not sufficiently reliable >> anyway. It's not like we should *ever* keep doing softirq's forever, >> and quite frankly, when you introduce the limit of doing the loop at >> most ten times, I doubt that the "2 milliseconds" limit is even >> relevant any more. It would be a strange situation where ten times >> through the softirq handling loop would take more than 2ms. > > We've seen very often this taking more than 50ms here. > > Things get better, but back in 2013, timer handlers could run for quite > a long time. The infamous one is scheduled to me removed for 4.1 (TCP > SYNACK retransmit timer) If he is doing full crypto in software, it is definitely possible for new packets to show up (and thus new softirq work) before existing work is complete. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html