Re: Question about tg3 and bnx2 driver suppliers

On Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:17:00 +0100
Eric Dumazet [off-list ref] wrote:

Le dimanche 20 février 2011 à 19:19 +0100, Micha Nelissen a écrit :

quoted

Eric Dumazet wrote:

quoted

One possible cause of packet drops is when softirqs are disabled for too
long periods, even if NIC has a big RX ring (check ethtool -g eth0)

Why aren't the softirqs converted to workqueues? Wouldn't that cut 
dependencies to other softirq users and improve latency?

Because it was done like that in the old days.

Its a bit less important these days, now typical machines have 8+ cpus.
Each device interrupt can be handled by its own cpu :)

The latency to schedule a work queue is still much higher
than the latency to do a softirq. Last time I played around with it,
things like loopback performance dropped 10% if using work queue.