On Sat, 10 Aug 2002, Robert Davies wrote:
> From what I read of SPARC idea, it didn't really work out in practice, as
> compiler writers couldn't keep track of the register windows.
Trap levels are a hardware feature though, that said, I don't know what of
the hardware features get used on SPARC Linux as I've not investigated.
> Anyway the ring buffer explanation, is best bit, the driver is only in poll
> mode, whilst there is data to process, if there's none left in ring buffer it
> goes back to interrupts. Whilst there is, then you don't need interrupts to
> know there's something to do, do you?
No, but you tell the device not to generate more and read data that needs
processing - this is not polling per se. it's a hybrid situation - I guess
it's similar to how a lot of serial/parallel stuff goes in theory,
is this what you were alluding to before? I should read your link I guess.
Jon.
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