Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 12 Jan 2001 16:56:24 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: QUESTION: Network hangs with BP6 and 2.4.x kernels, hardware |
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On Sat, 13 Jan 2001, Frank de Lange wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 12, 2001 at 04:36:33PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > It may well not be disable_irq() that is buggy. In fact, there's good > > reason to believe that it's a hardware problem. > > I am inclined to believe it IS a hardware problem... If disable_irq were buggy, > wouldn't the problem occur more frequently in other irq-heavy areas? A quick > count shows that disable_irq* is used in 84 sourcefiles in the driver/* > directory. This includes drivers which generate many interrupts in a short > timeframe (like ide).
IDE is not my favourite example of a "known stable driver". Also, in many cases IDE is for historical reasons connected to an EDGE io-apic pin (ie it's still considered an ISA interrupt). Which probably wouldn't show this problem anyway.
Also, IDE doesn't generate all that many interrupts. You can make a network driver do a _lot_ more interrupts than just about any disk driver by simply sending/receiving a lot of packets. With disks it is very hard to get the same kind of irq load - Linux will merge the requests and do at least 1kB worth of transfer per interrupt etc. On a ne2k 100Mbps PCI card, you can probably _easily_ generate a much higher stream of interrupts.
Linus
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