[Devil-linux-develop] NAPI support

[Peter F. <pe...@em...>]

Is there any interest in implementing a few NAPI drivers along with DL?

For those of you who don't know, NAPI is a high-performance architecture
that forgoes Interrupts in favor of polling.  A very suitable mechanism
for devices that would otherwise generate thousands of interrupts/sec,
like Gigabit Network cards.  Or for users who manage networks with a
high percentage of small packets (like me).

There is a good bit of information here:
ftp://robur.slu.se/pub/Linux/net-development/NAPI/
(read the README)

The Kernel patches are already included in 2.4.20+ and 2.6+.  The only
thing missing is the NIC drivers.

The drivers for e1000, eepro100, and tulip are stable.  Tulip being the
most tested.  There are loose reports of 8139 drivers, but all the
patches I found are from 2001.  The 3com patch is pretty old as well, i
would not trust it.

As a side note, NAPI goes beyond network card drivers, once the kernel
is patched, any other device that would generate lots of interrupts
could be handled NAPI style.  A good example is video capture devices. 
The folks that run the dvr project have had a good discussion of video
capture cards and NAPI enabled drivers for them.


-- 
I look forward to hearing from you.

Peter Frischknecht
Empowering Solutions, Inc.
http://www.empoweringsolutions.com
AIM: esipeterf
877.GOESI74 x803 Phone
704.625.9019	 Fax