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David S. Miller authored
Robert Olsson, and Alexey Kuznetsov. This changeset adds the framework and implementation, but drivers need to be ported to NAPI in order to take advantage of the new facilities. NAPI is fully backwards compatible, current drivers will continue to work as they always have. NAPI is a way for dealing with high packet load. It allows the driver to disable the RX interrupts on the card and enter a polling mode. Another way to describe NAPI would be as implicit mitigation. Once the device enters this polling mode, it will exit back to interrupt based processing when the receive packet queue is purged. A full porting and description document is found at: Documentation/networking/NAPI_HOWTO.txt and this also makes reference to Usenix papers on the web and other such resources available on NAPI. NAPI has been found to not only increase packet processing rates, it also gives greater fairness to the other interfaces in the system which are not experiencing high packet load.
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