Linux Plumbers Conf 2009

Excerpt

Description

Several in the networking community are skeptical on using interrupt threads for the network devices. I will argue that not only does it make the solution more simplex, but also increases network throughput. With the introduction of the threaded interrupt infrastructure into 2.6.30, the path has been paved to allow networking devices to take advantage of this. The threaded interrupt may then do all the work needed to hand off the packet to the thread code without all the complexities needed in locking while using the softirqs.

I will present my ideas and even a working proof of concept, to convince those that still have doubts that the future of the network and Linux in general, is a kernel free from softirqs.

Tags

network, threaded interrupts

Speaker

• 

  Steven Rostedt

  Red Hat, Inc
  Biography

  Steven has been hacking the Linux kernel since 1999. He focuses on the Real Time kernel, but lately has been spending his time on the Linux kernel tracer Ftrace. Steven tries to find better ways to enhance the kernel’s performance as well as latencies, which makes ftrace the perfect tool. Steven did his masters thesis on Real Time TCP/IP and is now starting to get the itch again to play with the network stack.