jason jiang writes:
 > >From my experience, use the softintr to distribute the packets to
 > upper layer will get poor performance on latency and througput
 > performance than handle it in single interrupt thread. And you want to
 > make sure do not handle too much packets in one interrupts. 
 >  
 >  
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I see that both interrupt scheme suffer from the same
drawback of pinning whatever thread happens to be running on 
the interrupt/softintr cpu. The problem gets really annoying
when the incoming inter-packets time interval is smaller than the
handling time under the interrupt. Even if the code is set
to return after handling N packets, a new interrupt will be
_immediately_ signified and the pinning will keep on going.

Now, the per-packet handling time, is not a well defined
entity. The software stack can choose to do more (say push up
through TCP/IP) or less work (just queue and wake kernel
thread) on each packet. All this needs to be managed based
on the load and we're moving in that direction.

At the driver level, if you reach a point where you have a
large queue in the HW receive rings, that is a nice
indication that deferring the processing to a non-interrupt
kernel thread would be good. Under this condition the thread 
wakeup cost is amortized over the handling of many packets.

-r

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