Re: Bottom halves.

B. James Phillippe (bryan@terran.org)
Fri, 1 Oct 1999 08:15:33 -0700 (PDT)


On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Rogier Wolff wrote:

> > > The comment at the top states:
> > >
> > > * do_bottom_half() runs at normal kernel priority: all interrupts
> > > * enabled. do_bottom_half() is atomic with respect to itself: a
> > > * bottom_half handler need not be re-entrant.

Speaking of bottom halves, I am thinking about a peculiar idea I'd like to
experiment with and am wondering if anyone's fooled around with it already.
That is, to make the entire bottom-half routine preemptible by moving the
do_bottom_half functionality into a kernel thread. The reason is to allow
greater overall system performance under high softirq-time load, such as
high-speed packet-filtering. Performance of that stuff in turn would
suffer to some undetermined degree.

Any caveats I would need to watch for?

-bp

--
# bryan at terran dot org
# http://www.terran.org/~bryan

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