Subject: Re: bnx2/BCM5709: why 5 interrupts on a 4 core system (2.6.33.3)

From: Krzysztof Olędzki <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 17:35:26 +0200

On 2010-05-16 20:51, Michael Chan wrote:
> Krzysztof Oledzki wrote:
>
>>
>> Why the driver registers 5 interrupts instead of 4? How to
>> limit it to 4?
>>
>
> The first vector (eth0-0) handles link interrupt and other slow
> path events.  It also has an RX ring for non-IP packets that are
> not hashed by the RSS hash.  The majority of the rx packets should
> be hashed to the rx rings eth0-1 - eth0-4, so I would assign these
> vectors to different CPUs.

Did some more test on a two 4 core CPUs (8 CPUs reported to the system) 
and on a two 4 core CPUs with HT (16 CPUs reported to the system) and in 
both cases there are 8 instead of 9 vectors: eth0-0 .. eth0-7 (irqs 61 
.. 68). However, dmesg shows that 9 interrupts are allocated:

bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 61 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 62 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 63 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 64 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 65 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 66 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 67 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 68 for MSI/MSI-X
bnx2 0000:01:00.0: irq 69 for MSI/MSI-X

It such case, which ring will be used for slow path and non-IP packets 
and why there is no additional queue like in a 4CPU case?

Best regards,

			Krzysztof Olędzki