-----Original Message-----
From: J Hadi Salim [mailto:j.hadi123@gmail.com] On Behalf Of jamal
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 8:03 PM
To: Leonid Grossman
Cc: Waskiewicz Jr, Peter P; Patrick McHardy; davem@davemloft.net;
netdev@vger.kernel.org; jeff@garzik.org; Kok, Auke-jan H; Ramkrishna
Vepa; Alex Aizman
Subject: RE: [PATCH] NET: Multiqueue network device support.

our definition of "channel" on linux so far is a netdev
(not a DMA ring). A netdev is the entity that can be bound to a CPU.
Link layer flow control terminates (and emanates) from the netdev.

I think we are saying the same thing. Link layer flow control frames are
generated (and terminated) by the hardware; the hardware gets configured
by netdev.
And if a hw channel has enough resources, it could be configured as a
separate netdev and handle it's flow control the same way single-channel
NICs do now. 
I'm not advocating flow control on per DMA ring basis. 

quoted

This is not what I'm saying :-). The IEEE link you sent shows that
per-link flow control is a separate effort, and it will likely to

take

quoted

time to become a standard.

Ok, my impression was it was happening already or it will happen
tommorow morning ;->

the proposal you mentioned is dated 2005, but something like that will
probably happen sooner or later in IEEE. Some non-standard options,
including ours, are already here - but as we just discussed, in any case
flow control is arguably a netdev property not a queue property. 
The multi-queue patch itself though (and possibly some additional
per-queue properties) is a good thing :-)