Hi If you had the silicon resources you would directly ID each device as it interrupted. Back a long time ago (as in I had hair on my head then) there wasn't enough silicon available for that kind of thing. Today it would be pretty easy to do chip wise. Changing every motherboard, card, and OS in existence might create a few problems though.
Interrupt sharing has been a way of life since the 80286. You can fiddle and poke what you put where, but you still put multiple devices on each one. There simply are not enough interrupts available to do it any other way. You could argue that on an single board device you don't have the same constraints. That's true as far as it goes. In order to get the silicon changed what ever you do will have to work with that OS from Redmond. If it doesn't then there's no volume / money to do it. Bob On Sep 17, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote: > Maurice Janssen writes: >> On Sunday, September 16, 2007 at 21:26:36 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp >> wrote: >>> The 4801 unfortunately has all three internal network cards on the >>> same interrupt line, that's not a good thing because for every >>> interrupt the kernel will have to check all three network interfaces >>> to see where it came from. >> >> I'm by no means an expert on this subject, but others seem to think >> that interrupt sharing is a good thing: >> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-perform/2003/02/03/0000.html >> http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq12.html#IrqShare > > It depends. If the operating system in use has certain > optimisations and > misses certain others, it helps in some cases, including an important > case. But in general, more precise information from the hardware to > the > OS helps the OS work faster, and "eth0 needs care now" is more precise > than "either eth0, eth1, eth2 or a combination needs care now". > > Arnt > _______________________________________________ > Soekris-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech > _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
