Proposed 6.2 em RELEASE patch

Jack Vogel jfvogel at gmail.com
Thu Nov 9 01:19:08 UTC 2006


This patch is an evolution of the last one I sent out. It has
a couple of minor corrections, like a bad forward decl in
the header.

The last patch has had quite a bit of testing and all reports
have been positive.  The only complaint was from Gleb who
says he needs to keep his beloved infinite for loop in the
interrupt handler, well I have a better one for you Gleb, keep
reading.

I have also been doing some extreme stress testing using
SmartBits, and discovered the driver as it stands is really
not able to take extreme receive side pounding, Scott
pointed out that this is why the FAST_INTR work was done :)

There were some people that had stability issues with that
work, but there were also many that did not. I actually
merged the FAST code onto my last patch, and ran the
SB stress and found it really was able to gracefully handle
that load, way to go Scott :)

I've pondered this situation, and this patch I'm including here
today is the result. Here's what it does:

If you drop it in place, compile it, and go... you will get the
code that has been tested for a week, it uses the older
style interrupts, it has the watchdog and other SMP fixes
so its been proven.

BUT, I've added the FAST_INTR changes back into the code, so
if you go into your Makefile and add -DEM_FAST_INTR you will
then get the taskqueue stuff.

So, Gleb, rather than replace the infinite for loop that no one
thinks is a good idea, you can just define FAST_INTR again,
and you should be good to go.

I see this as the best thing for the 6.2 RELEASE, it lets us
keep moving forward, people that want max performance
can define EM_FAST_INTR and help us wring out any
problems, it also will mean that I will have our Intel test
group start using this code. But for those that just want
a stable driver the standard compile will still give them that.

The patch I'm including is against BETA3. Let me know of
your concerns or issues.

Cheers,

Jack
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