On Wed, 6 Jun 2012 17:49:42 +0300
"Michael S. Tsirkin" [off-list ref] wrote:

Sounds good, but I have a question: this realies on counters
being atomic on 64 bit.
Would not it be better to always use a seqlock even on 64 bit?
This way counters would actually be correct and in sync.
As it is if we want e.g. average packet size,
we can not rely e.g. on it being bytes/packets.

This has not been a requirement on real physical devices; therefore
the added overhead is not really justified.

Many network cards use counters in hardware to count packets/bytes
and there is no expectation of atomic access there.