Re: [PATCH] "lockless loopback" patch for 2.6.6

["David S. Miller" <davem@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 21 May 2004 14:04:09 -0700
Arthur Kepner <akepner@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> Lock contention on the loopback device can lead to poor
> performance, even an essentially hung system, on systems
> with many processors.
> 
> For the loopback device, the only purpose that locking serves
> is to protect the device statistics. The attached patch
> keeps per-cpu statistics for the loopback device and removes
> all locking. The patch is against 2.6.6.

It is legal to attach queueing disciplines to the loopback device
but your patch makes that impossible.

I don't think it is worth worrying about things like this especially
if you're going to be adding ugly loopback special cases to the
generic device handling code like this.