From owner-freebsd-net Wed Oct 9 1:20:21 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2367437B411 for ; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 01:20:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scribble.fsn.hu (scribble.fsn.hu [193.224.40.95]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 31E3643E6A for ; Wed, 9 Oct 2002 01:20:13 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bra@fsn.hu) Received: (qmail 4942 invoked by uid 1000); 9 Oct 2002 08:20:14 -0000 Received: from localhost (sendmail-bs@127.0.0.1) by localhost with SMTP; 9 Oct 2002 08:20:14 -0000 Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 10:20:14 +0200 (CEST) From: Attila Nagy To: "Kenneth D. Merry" Cc: Christopher Smith , , Subject: Re: High interrupt load on firewalls In-Reply-To: <20021008224649.A39689@panzer.kdm.org> Message-ID: References: <20021008224313.A39509@panzer.kdm.org> <20021008224649.A39689@panzer.kdm.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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-net" in the body of the message