polling(4) rocks!

[Yar Tikhiy]

Hi there,

I can't but remind you that there's polling(4) in FreeBSD :-)

Until today, I was convinced for some obscure reason that polling(4)
was an experimental feature that might or might not work.  Today I
tried it on our central router box and got astounding results.

The router box is a 1.4GHz Celeron PC with an fxp(4) interface split
across a dozen of vlans.  There is nothing special about its setup
except for ~250 rules loaded into ipfw2.  It is running 4.10-RELEASE.
Without polling, it was able to switch full 10Mbytes/sec of traffic
(~9kpps), but that took from 50 to 70% CPU time spent in interrupts.
With polling on, interrupt time never exceeds 5% and it stays as low
as 1-2% on average even when traffic is that high.

Many thanks to folks who have had a hand in polling(4) development!

Just in case: Please be aware that polling(4) won't make KDE run
faster unless on a busy router ;-)

-- 
Yar