* Rajagopal.Kunhappan at Sun.COM [2009-05-05 18:39:40] > Saurabh Misra wrote: >> >> It seems reducing number of vlan IDs resolves the problem and it has >> been seen before with NICDRV (VR driver VIA Ethernet chip). Clearly >> thread reaping by MAC layer isn't happening when the load reduces. >> >> While I'm discussing this, I have a comment to make. While running >> NICDRV in normal mode, I never saw MAC layer passing multiple mblks >> to my driver even though all the TX descriptors (256) were >> used. Something which is worth looking. bfe can program the chip to >> transmit multiple frames (or packets) at once since we can mark >> start and end of frame in the descriptor table. Do I have to do >> anything special in the driver? > > Nothing wrong with the driver. It is the MAC layer that is sending one > packet at a time. Even if this is fixed in MAC layer, it may not > benefit unless upper layers (IP) send chains.
The Xen network backend driver will pass chains of packets to the downstream MAC client (usually a VNIC). dme. -- David Edmondson, Sun Microsystems, http://dme.org
