[ofa-general] Re: [PATCH 1/4] [NET_SCHED] explict hold dev tx lock

[jamal]

On Mon, 2007-24-09 at 17:14 -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

> Since we are redoing this, 
> is there any way to make the whole TX path
> more lockless?  The existing model seems to be more of a monitor than
> a real locking model.

What do you mean it is "more of a monitor"?

On the challenge of making it lockless:
About every NAPI driver combines the tx prunning with rx polling. If you
are dealing with tx resources on receive thread as well as tx thread,
_you need_ locking. The only other way we can do avoid it is to separate
the rx path interupts from ones on tx related resources; the last NAPI
driver that did that was tulip; i think the e1000 for a short period in
its life did the same as well. But that has been frowned on and people
have evolved away from it.

cheers,
jamal