[net] protecting interfaces from races between control and data ?

[Warner Losh]

On Aug 5, 2013, at 11:20 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote:

> .. and I bet it's not a design pattern, and this is total conjecture on my part:
> 
> * the original drivers weren't SMP safe;
> * noone really sat down and figured out how to correctly synchronise
> all of this stuff;
> * people did the minimum amount of work to keep the driver from
> immediately crashing, but didn't really think things through at a
> larger scale.
> 
> Almost every driver is this way Luigi. :-)

Most of the drivers in the three don't support hardware that performs well enough for this to be a problem. :) Any driver that's still around from the pre-locking days can easily saturate the lines (or the hardware) on today's (and even yesterday's hardware).

All the rest have come up with different ways to cope...

Warner