polling(4) rocks!

[Wilkinson, Alex]

Why can some NIC use polling and others not ?

eg I went to turn on polling on my BCM5782 Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit
   Ethernet Card. And bge(4) doesn't mention anything about polling.
   
Is it a hardware feature of the NIC ?

 - aW


	0n Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 09:13:51PM +0300, Yar Tikhiy wrote: 

	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
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