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Re: Software router state of the art

  • From: William Herrin
  • Date: Sat Jul 26 15:47:00 2008

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Petri Helenius <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Herrin wrote:
>> But cards like the Intel Pro/1000 have 64k of memory for buffering
>> packets, both in and out. Few have very much more than 64k. 64k means
>> 32k to tx and 32k to rx. Means you darn well better generate an
>> interrupt when you get near 16k so that you don't fill the buffer
>> before the 16k you generated the interrupt for has been cleared. Means
>> you're generating an interrupt at least for every 10 or so 1500 byte
>> packets.
>>
>
> This is not true in the bus master dma mode how the cards are usually used.
> The mentioned memory is used only as temporary storage until the card can
> DMA the data into the buffers in main memory. Most Pro/1000 cards have
> buffering capability up to 4096 frames.

Pete,

I'll confess to some ignorance here. We're at the edge of my skill set.

The pro/1000 does not need to generate an interrupt in order to start
a DMA transfer? Can you refer me to some documents which explain in
detail how a card on the bus sets up a DMA transfer?

Thanks,
Bill


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William D. Herrin ................ [email protected] [email protected]
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