Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 12:59:27 -0400 (EDT) From: David Miller <dmiller@search.sparks.net> To: Attila Nagy <bra@fsn.hu> Cc: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org>, Christopher Smith <csmith@its.uq.edu.au>, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG, net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: High interrupt load on firewalls Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0210181257350.90681-100000@search.sparks.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0210091011560.3631-100000@scribble.fsn.hu>
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On Wed, 9 Oct 2002, Attila Nagy wrote: With a dc ethernet card and ~45K packets per second, an XP1700 system went from > 50% interrupt to < 1%. I was astounded at the change! If all it takes to get Gb interfaces polling is to send Luigi a card then he needs to send me his shipping address:) --- David > Hello, > > > You might want to try out some of the Intel gigabit boards. At least > > we've got an engineer from Intel who maintains the driver. > I'm far from being a FreeBSD expert, but Luigi Rizzo's polling patch > helped me a lot in similar cases to get better performance. > > >From POLLING(4): > DESCRIPTION > "Device polling" (polling for brevity) refers to a technique to handle > devices that does not rely on the latter to generate interrupts when they > need attention, but rather lets the CPU poll devices to service their > needs. This might seem inefficient and counterintuitive, but when done > properly, polling gives more control to the operating system on when and > how to handle devices, with a number of advantages in terms of system > responsivity and performance. > > AFAIK there are only two problems about that: > SUPPORTED DEVICES > Polling requires explicit modifications to the device drivers. As of > this writing, the dc, fxp, rl and sis devices are supported, with other > in the works. > > (no Gigabit cards) > > and > sys/kern/kern_poll.c: > [...] > #ifdef SMP > #include "opt_lint.h" > #ifndef COMPILING_LINT > #error DEVICE_POLLING is not compatible with SMP > #endif > #endif > [...] > > (no SMP support) > > As stated above, I'm not an expert, but my opinion is that polling would > be the best on the Gigabit cards (due to their capacity) and not the Fast > Ethernet ones. > > Maybe we could start sending GE hardware to Luigi :) > > ----------[ Free Software ISOs - http://www.fsn.hu/?f=download ]---------- > Attila Nagy e-mail: Attila.Nagy@fsn.hu > Free Software Network (FSN.HU) phone @work: +361 210 1415 (194) > cell.: +3630 306 6758 > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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