Finding a more elegant solution to the deadlock issue in Ethernet drivers was my original reason for trying this out. But the (yet somewhat unverified) performance increase is a bonus.
I mentioned both advantages in the submitted patch.
I have not yet done any performance measurements. It is sifficult to measure this particular optimization, since it cannot be measured as a decreased latency between two events.
Instead, the number of CPU cycles spent per second for a certain traffic load must be measured. A much more difficult measurement...
I would need to find a way to produce a perfectly controlled traffic load, and then measure the exact CPU load.
The patch decreases the amount of code executed in the processing of a pbuf, so there should be a performance increase. But it might not be a big difference.
Regards,
Timmy Brolin
On 3 nov 2011 17:15 "Bill Auerbach" <address@hidden> wrote:
Simon,
I commented based on the “This should improve performance” statement
in Timmy’s message. The intent was not to invalidate the change or deem it unnecessary,
only to not have performance be a reason one heads off in the direction of
adding this feature to their port. I well could be wrong about performance too
– this is merely an opinion based on code review.
Bill
From:
address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden On Behalf
Of Simon Goldschmidt
Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 9:47 AM
To: Mailing list for lwIP users
Subject: Re: [lwip-users] Automatic Rx DMA ring replenish
I haven’t benchmarked to be
able to provide factual data, but I’ve done a lot of optimization and tweaking
of lwIP to improve bandwidth and my study of pbufs and memory pools did not
show the need for improvement considering all of the other things required to
handle a TCP connection.
I saw the patch not as speed optimization but as a way to
simplify the netif driver: to provide a robust implementation, a netif driver
would have to ensure it retries if pbuf_alloc fails because the pool is empty
(to prevent a deadlock). This patch prevents a netif driver having to implement
some sort of timer because it just gets notified when pbufs are available
again.
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