Re: wi polling

On 2/28/2003 9:44 AM, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> In message: <[email protected]>
>             Lars Eggert <[email protected]> writes:
> : that's too bad - our Soekris boxes livelock easily doing hostap 
> : processing. Is this something that cannot ever work (e.g. due to how 
> : hostap works, which I have only a foggy notion of)?
> 
> I've only seen lockups with 'bad' firmware versions.  There's nothing
> inherent in hostap that would cause this.  If there's a non-hardware
> releated livelock, then the driver should be fixed.

Sorry for being unclear: By "livelock" I mean the CPU spends all its 
cycles on receive and hostap processing, to a point where userland 
processes are starved. The box doesn't panic and becomes responsive 
again when network load goes down.

Polling helps with this at L3, but I'm not sure if it'd do anything for 
hostap, since that seems to be an L2 thing.

Lars
-- 
Lars Eggert <[email protected]>           USC Information Sciences Institute