is polling still a thing?

[Olivier Cochard-Labbé]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 9:15 PM, Michael Sierchio <kudzu at tenebras.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On small, embedded computers running ipfw w/kernel nat and device polling
> enabled (on em ether adapters), I observed the *reported* system load grow
> very high. When disabling polling on the interfaces, it went back to
> something normal.
>
> My impression is that the consensus among the core developers concerned
> with networking is that device polling is an ancient hack and is
> deprecated. In the case of a DDoS attack, there may be many other things to
> try - at the infrastructure level - traffic diversion techniques like BGP
> flowspec, use anycast, etc.  On the individual server level, use stateful
> rules with GRED enabled, dropping most new tcp or udp traffic based on load.
>
>
>
If I remember well, Luigi had a surprise regarding the advantage of using
polling inside a VM:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2013-May/035626.html

But on real hardware, since the introduction of interrupt moderation on
NIC, polling is not more useful.