interrupt coalescing / polling

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 25 Feb 1999, John Plevyak wrote:

> I am considering studying the interrupt overhead on the receive side.
> I'll keep you informed.

That's an excellent thing to do.

> What do you think about under high load avoiding the interrupts 
> entirely and running off the timer interrupt?

It's bad for latency, but that's mitigated if you only do it under high
load.
The normal timer interrupts are too coarse for a reasonable polling mode.

Some cards have internal timers that can be used for this.
I think the EEPro100 has one as well.

The idea is that when you are handling too much work, or have taken too many
interrupts recently (both hard to characterize), you disable all interrupt
sources except for the card's timer interrupt.  When the timer goes off you
process the packets and either set the timer again or re-enable interrupts.

The Rx ring size should be increased from the default 32, to a size that
a little more than you can receive in a polling tick.  You want the hardware
rather than the software to discard packets when you are exceptionally busy,
although that's difficult to get right unless you peek at how full the
protocol input queue is.

I implemented a sleazy version of this in the 3c59x driver, but older 3c590
cards didn't have timers so I didn't do it correctly.  All of my drivers
have interrupt work limits, which is an ideal place to put such interrupt
rate mitigation code.

I've also implemented a polling-mode-only Tulip driver for PowerBooks with
broken interrupt controllers, but that was a hack to get it working rather
than an attempt to lower system overhead.

> Is there a configuration variable to turn off receive interrupts?

Unlike most chips the EEPro100 has only a global interrupt mask, not
individual interrupt enables.  You would have to turn off the interrupt bits
on the receive descriptor list.

Donald Becker					  becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
USRA-CESDIS, Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center,  Greenbelt, MD.  20771
301-286-0882	     http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/people/becker/whoiam.html