On Wed, 27 Dec 2006, jamal wrote:

On Wed, 2006-27-12 at 09:09 +0200, Robert Iakobashvili wrote:

quoted

My scenario is treatment of RTP packets in kernel space with a single network
card (both Rx and Tx). The default of the Intel 5000 series chipset is
affinity of each
network card to a certain CPU. Currently, neither with irqbalance nor
with kernel
irq-balancing (MSI and io-apic attempted) I do not find a way to
balance that irq.

In the near future, when the NIC vendors wake up[1] because CPU vendors
- including big bad Intel -  are going to be putting out a large number
of hardware threads, you should be able to do more clever things with
such a setup. At the moment, just tie it to a single CPU and have your
other processes that are related running/bound on the other cores so you
can utilize them. OTOH, you say you are only using 30% of the one CPU,
so it may not be a big deal to tie your single nic to on cpu.

Anyway, it seems that with more advanced firewalls/routers kernel spends 
most of a time in IPSec/crypto code, netfilter conntrack and iptables 
rules/extensions, routing lookups, etc and not in hardware IRQ handler. 
So, it would be nice if this part coulde done by all CPUs.

Best regards,


 			Krzysztof Olędzki