[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH 0/9 Rev3] Implement batching skb API and support in IPoIB

[Krishna Kumar2]

Hi Dave,

David Miller <davem at davemloft.net> wrote on 08/09/2007 03:31:37 AM:

> > What do you generally think of the patch/implementation ? :)
>
> We have two driver implementation paths on recieve and now
> we'll have two on send, and that's not a good trend.

Correct.

> In an ideal world all the drivers would be NAPI and netif_rx()
> would only be used by tunneling drivers and similar in the
> protocol layers.  And likewise all sends would go through
> ->hard_start_xmit().
>
> If you can come up with a long term strategy that gets rid of
> the special transmit method, that'd be great.
>
> We should make Linux network drivers easy to write, not more difficult
> by constantly adding most interfaces than we consolidate.

I think that is a good top level view, and I agree with that.

Patrick had suggested calling dev_hard_start_xmit() instead of
conditionally calling the new API and to remove the new API
entirely. The driver determines whether batching is required or
not depending on (skb==NULL) or not. Would that approach be fine
with this "single interface" goal ?

Thanks,

- KK