Polling and kern.polling.idle_poll

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 11:31:51AM -0400, Larry Baird wrote:
> > Curious as to why you don't simply lay out the $40 for a modern ethernet card that doesn't need polling to work well?
> These are low end embedded boxs.  No way to upgrade.  But in actuallity
> they have modern (fxp) NICS.  From our testing, live lock is a real issue

Lack of intelligent interrupt mitigation is a weak point of fxp(4)
hardwares. You may not need poling(4) any more on recent PCIe
based fast ethernet controllers.

> for gateways receiving lots of network traffic.  Polling prevents live
> lock.
> 
And it may also add additional latencies.

> Larry