On Wed, 2005-22-06 at 09:23 -0700, Leonid Grossman wrote:
> >
> > See the comment above. We decide if a packet is multicast vs.
> > unicast, IP vs. other at approximately
> > interrupt/"rx_copybreak" time. Very few NIC provide this
> > info in status bits, so we end up looking at the packet
> > header. That read moves the previously known-uncached data
> > (after all, it was just came in from a bus write) into the L1
> > cache for the CPU handling the device. Once it's there, the
> > copy is almost free.
>
> What status bits a NIC has to provide, in order for the stack to avoid
> touching headers?
> In our case, the headers are separated by the hardware so ideally we would
> like to avoid any header processing altogether,
> and reduce the number of cache misses.
>
Provide metadata that can be used to totaly replace eth_type_trans()
i.e answer the questions: is it multi/uni/broadcast, is the packet for
us (you would need to be programmed with what for us means), Is it IP,
ARP etc. I am sure any standard NIC these days can do a subset of these
You want to go one step further then allow the user to download a
number of filters and tell you what tag you should put on the descriptor
when sending the packet to user space on a match or mismatch.
If say you allowed 1024 such filters (not very different from the
current multicast filters), you could cut down a lot of CPU time.
cheers,
jamal
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