On Thursday 08 August 2002 18:48, you wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Robert Davies wrote:
> > Even with DMA, the card generally has to generate an Interrupt to say a
> > packet needs servicing. There are cards which permit polling rather than
> > interrupts, and a driver was under development to use that feature. If
> > you're interested a search of Kernel Traffic or the LWN kernel pages,
> > might show up an explanation how a non-interrupt driven driver would
> > work.
>
> That would be almost stupid for high performance networking ;-)
I'm not sure what you mean there, but it's not stupid, if you know you have
data streaming in, why not process it directly in busy times, rather than
wait for an ISR to copy in data and schedule a tasklet to process it?
Yes Linux interrupts are low overhead, but they are still interrupting the
processor and requiring some processor state to be saved.
Rob
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