Re: [PATCH 1/2]: powerpc/cell spidernet bottom half

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 01:03:20AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

Could well be related to latencies when going to the remote
node for descriptor DMAs. Have you tried if the hch's NUMA
patch or using numactl makes a difference here?

No. I guess I should try.

quoted

quoted

sounds like the right approach to simplify the code.

Its not a big a driver. 'wc' says its 2.3 loc, which
is 1/3 or 1/5 the size of tg3.c or the e1000*c files.

Right, I was thinking of removing a lock or another, not
throwing out half of the driver ;-)

There's only four lock points grand total. 
-- One on the receive side,
-- one to protect the transmit head pointer, 
-- one to protect the transmit tail pointer, 
-- one to protect the location of the transmit low watermark.

The last three share the same lock. I tried using distinct
locks, but this worsened things, probably due to cache-line 
trashing. I tried removing the head pointer lock, but this
failed. I don't know why, and was surprised by this. I thought
hard_start_xmit() was serialized.

--linas