Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> (note Linus, not for applying...)
>
> Here is a patch, against 2.4.0-test11-pre2, that I wanted to forward
> to the lists for comment.
>
> Many of the ethernet drivers have timer routines, which are
> called every three-five seconds or so. These timer routines
> typically do stuff related to media selection or checking, and call
> mdio_{read,write} to interact with the phy.
>
I think it's useful. More generally, I'd like to have
"process context timers" - the ability to call a function
from process context at a set time. Then a single kernel
thread could handle all things like this. Pretty simple to do.
BTW: can the OOM killer possibly kill a kernel thread?
If it does, yenta_socket_thread() will nuke the machine.
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