Andi Kleen wrote: 

quoted

It makes sense to provide an API for the NIC driver to allocate skb 
from the
*right* mempool. This way if I have plenty of hw rings and/or can 
allow myself a luxury to associate 1-to-1 connection and 

ring, there's 

quoted

a nice and clean memory management model. Even NICs that 

have only few 

quoted

rings could use this - for critical (e.g., storage) connections.

It wont work - I can guarantee you that if you add a limit 
like "we only support 8 iscsi connections max" then 
users/customers will raise hell because it does not fit their 
networks.

Something a bit more intelligent, like: we only support 7 resource-protected
(a.k.a. critical) iSCSI connection, and we use one remaining ring for the
rest iSCSI, TCP, UDP, etc. traffic. The 7 iSCSI connections could be quite a
bit, in terms of LUNs, and just enough for a customer to feel "protected" in
a sense that unrelated receive burst starves storage traffic to death. Note
that "8 rings" here is just an example; as time goes by the number of hw
receive rings and the hw ability to intelligently classify and steer traffic
onto these rings will only increase.  

Alex