[Click] polling patch for e1000-7.3.20

[Massimiliano Poletto]

click mailman disciplined me for not sending from the right address.
Here is my reply to Roman FYI.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Massimiliano Poletto <max.poletto at gmail.com>
Date: Jan 17, 2007 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: polling patch for e1000-7.3.20
To: Roman Chertov <rchertov at purdue.edu>
Cc: click at amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu, Matt Gordon <mgordon at mazunetworks.com>


On 1/17/07, Roman Chertov <rchertov at purdue.edu> wrote:
> Why did you change the default ring parameters from 256 to 64?

That was Matt's idea.  He experimented with different settings via
ethtool, and found that 64 gave better performance on the IBM boxes.
It makes no difference on the Intel boxes, which have slightly lower
receive and forwarding rates despite faster CPUs and generally better
hardware specs.  Currently we don't have an explanation for 64 vs.
256, nor for why the theoretically faster hardware is slower.  It's
just what we observed.

Note also that with the current driver the packet counts reported by
'ifconfig ethX' do not change unless you run 'ethtool -S ethX'.  We'll
try to fix that.

max