[TriLUG] scheduling of reception of packets by a "protocol stack"

[Reginald Reed]

Howdy James!

Have they considered using zero copy drivers + user protocol stacks?   
This maps a section of ram that the Ethernet port dma's directly  
into.  You then have full control to do whatever you want in userspace.

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 14, 2008, at 11:13 AM, "James Olin Oden" <james.oden at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> So here is the really simple high level problem I'm seeing.  A group
> of developers have developed a protocol that sits on top of an
> ethernet driver (e1000).  When the ethernet driver hands off the
> packet it received to the protocol it seems to be always running the
> protocols callback on the same processor its  bottom end received the
> packet upon.  In this case due to some heavy in kernel processing (I
> know bad idea, but sometimes you end up here) this ends up saturating
> the processing capability of this lone processor.
>
> So here are my questions:
>
>   1) How does the kernel schedule the hand off of a packet to a
> protocol from its layer 2 drivers?
>   2) Where is the code that handles this scheduling in the kernel  
> source?
>   3) Where else might I ask this question?  I'm trying to avoid the
> linux kernel list for various reasons, but if there is a smaller
>       list where newbies to linux kernel networking might ask
> questions I'd be pleased to know that.
>
>
> Thanks...james
> -- 
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