• David S. Miller's avatar
    Integrate NAPI work done by Jamal Hadi Salim, · abb85ec3
    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.
    abb85ec3
dev.c 68.6 KB