On 2 Sep 2000, Jes Sorensen wrote:
> You can't DMA directly from a file cache page unless you have a
> network card that does scatter/gather DMA and surprise surprise,
> 80-90% of the cards on the market don't support this. [...]
exactly. The TUX patch solves this by copying 'multi-fragment skbs' into a
temporary single-fragment skb, if the card doesnt support scatter-gather,
64-bit DMA. This way the copying is delayed as much as possible, to the
point where we queue the packet to the network device.
> Besides that you need to do copy-on-write if you want to be able to do
> zero copy on write() from user space [...]
i agree that this is hard - i'm not sure wether we want to go the pain to
enable anonymous-buffer write()s do zero-copy. My plan is to enable
sendfile() first - it should cover all the important high-performance
server cases. The point is that a write() is only used if some sort of
dynamic data is generated on the fly. If data is generated once and sent
once then there is no much win in zero-copy. If data is generated once and
reused multiple times afterwards then it should rather be written into a
temporary file and then it can be sent out via sendfile().
Ingo
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Sep 07 2000 - 21:00:15 EST