interrupt latency and driver locking

[John Polstra]

On 20-Sep-2003 Luigi Rizzo wrote:

> the main problem, as i see it, is that when there are PHY events you
> still need to do some expensive work while holding a lock that
> blocks interrupts, with very bad impact on the worst-case
> response of the system.

I agree that is a problem, but I don't think it is the main problem.
In a running system, PHY events essentially never happen, so it
doesn't matter much if they take a long time.  In other words, the PHY
really only needs attention when the link state changes, and for all
practical purposes that never happens in a running system.

What is killing us is the periodic polling of the PHY every second,
only to find out that nothing has changed.

John