Re: Software router state of the art

["William Herrin" <herrin-nanog () dirtside com>]

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Petri Helenius <petri () helenius fi> 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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