(Aggregation tends to be bad for latency, which is why it's hard: there
needs to be some way for the interrupt handler to tell the system that "I
want bh's run _now_, because I got an important packet or I'm close to
filling up the queues").
I don't know if it's really worth pursuing, though.
This would be really nice for SLIP/PPP processing. We could have the
drivers only run the BH when a SLIP or PPP framing character was
processed. This gives us the benefits of aggregation without the
downside of latency, since we kick the BH at exactly the right time ---
when we've gotten a full packet worth of data, and can send it to the
network layer.
Furthermore, it shouldn't be that hard to have interrupt drivers return
a flag indicating whether BH's should run now or not. It's something
that would be really nice for 2.3.
- Ted
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