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  • Lennert Buytenhek's avatar
    [PATCH] intel ixp2000 network driver · 15d014d1
    Lennert Buytenhek authored
    
    
    The way the hardware and firmware work is that there is one shared RX
    queue and IRQ for a number of different network interfaces.  Due to this,
    we would like to process received packets for every interface in the same
    NAPI poll handler, so we need a pseudo-device to schedule polling on.
    
    What the driver currently does is that it always schedules polling for
    the first network interface in the list, and processes packets for every
    interface in the poll handler for that first interface -- however, this
    scheme breaks down if the first network interface happens to not be up,
    since netif_rx_schedule_prep() checks netif_running().
    
    sky2 apparently has the same issue, and Stephen Hemminger suggested a
    way to work around this: create a variant of netif_rx_schedule_prep()
    that does not check netif_running().  I implemented this locally and
    called it netif_rx_schedule_prep_notup(), and it seems to work well,
    but it's something that probably not everyone would be happy with.
    
    The ixp2000 is an ARM CPU with a high-speed network interface in the
    CPU itself (full duplex 4Gb/s or 10Gb/s depending on the IXP model.)
    The CPU package also contains 8 or 16 (again depending on the IXP
    model) 'microengines', which are somewhat primitive but very fast
    and efficient processor cores which can be used to offload various
    things from the main CPU.
    
    This driver makes the high-speed network interface in the CPU visible
    and usable as a regular linux network device.  Currently, it only
    supports the Radisys ENP2611 IXP board, but adding support for other
    board types should be fairly easy.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLennert Buytenhek <buytenh@wantstofly.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
    15d014d1