Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] sky2: Allocate initial skbs in sky2_alloc_buffers

From: Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 22:12:46 -0800

On Fri, 5 Feb 2010 18:10:45 -0800
Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:22:59 +0900
> Mike McCormack <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > Allocating everything in one place means there's a single point
> > of failure in sky2_up, and sky2_rx_start can no longer fail.
> 
> If ring is never allocated, how then it must fail in up.
> Plus if the initial ring allocation is partial it should fail.

Let me put that clearer...
When dev_open is called, the system might be very short of memory
and unable to allocate the number of receive buffers; in that case,
I would prefer that an error was returned to the application.
Yes, this is a corner case; but it is better to fail with a noisy
error than limp along with a dead device.