Date: Wed, 9 Oct 2002 10:20:14 +0200 (CEST) From: Attila Nagy <bra@fsn.hu> To: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> Cc: Christopher Smith <csmith@its.uq.edu.au>, <hardware@FreeBSD.ORG>, <net@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: High interrupt load on firewalls Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0210091011560.3631-100000@scribble.fsn.hu> In-Reply-To: <20021008224649.A39689@panzer.kdm.org> References: <B9C9E292.30E56%csmith@its.uq.edu.au> <20021008224313.A39509@panzer.kdm.org> <20021008224649.A39689@panzer.kdm.org>
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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 :)
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