Interrupts + Polling mode (similar to Linux's NAPI)

[Barney Cordoba]

--- On Thu, 4/30/09, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:

> From: Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: Interrupts + Polling mode (similar to Linux's NAPI)
> To: barney_cordoba at yahoo.com
> Cc: "FreeBSD Net" <freebsd-net at freebsd.org>
> Date: Thursday, April 30, 2009, 11:51 AM
> 2009/4/30 Barney Cordoba <barney_cordoba at yahoo.com>:
> > Its one of the sad truths of FreeBSD. You'd think
> with such a large number
> > of commercial users you'd be able to get plenty of
> funding for the things
> > that really need to be done, rather then taking
> whatever bread crumbs
> > are thrown your way. Perhaps you need fewer bearded
> academics and a few
> > more suits to run the project more like a business
> than an extended
> > masters thesis?
> 
> That is happening. Robert/Kris' (and others) working on
> parallelising
> the network stack all the way up and down. Kip has been
> working on
> dramatically improving TCP connection and packet forward
> scalability
> to support 10GE. This is in part commercially funded work.
> 
> The problem with "commercial funding" is that for
> the most part,
> FreeBSD/Linux/etc "mostly work" for most use
> cases. What you're not
> seeing is 100% contribution back from commercial
> organisations who
> have extended FreeBSD (and linux for that matter) in their
> environment
> to fix specific performance constraints. This is finally
> changing and
> stuff is being pushed back into the public tree.

I think its unlikely that a commercial implementation is going to
be of much use generally, as with a mutex based OS you're going to 
have to do heavy specialization to get the results  you want. For
example a web server, transparent firewall and router would required
very different implementations to be properly optimised. 

I'm going to regularly hear the open sorcerers whining about 
contributing, but the fact is that the work I'm doing has no place in 
a general purpose OS. Optimizing for a specific commercial product is
going to require all kinds of fudging and gimmickry. 

Barney