Re: [Devil-linux-develop] NAPI support

[<hzu...@ra...>]

On 06/01/2004 01:49:13 PM Peter Frischknecht wrote:
>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.

Since this wpuld be a new feature, it can only be considered for DL 1.3.

DL 1.3 will drop Kernel 2.4 support and only concentrate on 2.6

Heiko