Re: proposed optimization for network drivers

[don-linux@isis.cs3-inc.com (Don Cohen)]

In part I agree.  I would have preferred to make my change in one
place instead of one driver at a time.  On the other hand, it seems to
me that some of these details are already spread around all the
drivers.  For instance, why does every driver have to call
eth_type_trans?  Could that be delayed for netif_rx ?

I do think it's reasonable for a driver to test whether the upper
layers are ready to process another packet.  I suggest that this 
test be encapsulated into a new function that can be changed at the
cost of only recompiling all the drivers.

David S. Miller writes:
 > 
 > What is we change the congestion implementation?  Then we'll
 > have to edit every single driver.  I don't think that's very
 > maintainable.
 > 
 > The whole idea is to abstract things out as far as possible so that
 > the device drivers are totally agnostic about the details of the
 > generic network queueing implementation.
 > 
 > I mean, it's an interesting idea, but it exposes details that
 > should not be exposed.