Re: [Etherboot-developers] currticks function

[<ebi...@ln...>]

ke...@us... (Ken Yap) writes:
> 
> >Why you decided to use poll instead of interrupts ? The cs89x0 drivers 
> >uses poll but I didn't check the rest of the drivers.
> 
> All of Etherboot uses polling. As explained in the history, this is the
> way the original was designed, and this design aspect has not been
> changed.  In practice, there isn't anything wrong with polling. If you
> are thinking you are missing packets due to polling, all the protocols
> involved are synchronous so interrupts don't help there.  Polling makes
> the drivers easier to write and debug, especially with a system just
> booted from raw metal---try debugging an asynchronous system someday.
> The drawback is that it makes callbacks hard.

There is a very real advantage in initial system bring up in that
you don't need to have interrupt mapping from the pci interrupt
to system interrupt numbers.  On some systems it is easy on other it
is hard, the only constant is that the necessary code varies widely from
system to system.  I have had multiple occasions where in bring up
LinuxBIOS on x86 systems where etherboot works, but the kernel can't
get interrupts working.

Eric