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Date:      Fri, 21 Sep 2001 23:13:21 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Josef Karthauser <joe@tao.org.uk>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org>, Jun Kuriyama <kuriyama@imgsrc.co.jp>, Julian Elischer <julian@FreeBSD.org>, current@FreeBSD.org, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
Subject:   Re: Problems with interrupts on -current.
Message-ID:  <3BAC2C01.64BC7F1B@mindspring.com>
References:  <XFMail.010921145354.jhb@FreeBSD.org>

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John Baldwin wrote:
> Bah, we leave interrupts disabled during fast interrupt handlers, so this
> should be fine in -current since the softclock swi_sched() uses SWI_NOSWITCH
> (there is no NOSWITCH flag in a preemptive kernel, it's automatic and that is
> what bit the preemption kernel).

I think you will see this problem elsewhere, as time goes on.

It is reasonable to leave ethernet card interrupts disabled,
in order to load-shed prior to having to handle an interrupt,
as a means of receiver livelock avoidance.

Were you to implement a fair share scheduler to ensure that
your web server or firewall got a chance to process incoming
packets in a user space process to completion, rather than
spending all its time fielding hardware interrupts to the
exclusion of all else, part of the implementation would be
to disable interrupts on the card when the kernel-to-user
queue hit a certain depth, and not reenable them until it
hit a corresponding low water mark, at some later time.  A
reasonable approximation of this would establish high and
low watermarks on mbuf usage, and not reenable interrupts if
there were less than some low watermark of mbufs free.  Then
on the freeing of mbufs, the reenables would be delayed until
more than a high watermark of mbufs had been freed back to
the system.  Jeff Mogul, of DEC Western Research Laboratories,
suggested this approach in 1994.

-- Terry

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