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polling(4)

NAME

     polling -- device polling support

SYNOPSIS

     options DEVICE_POLLING
     options HZ=1000

DESCRIPTION

     Device polling (polling for brevity) refers to a technique that lets the
     operating system periodically poll devices, instead of relying on the
     devices to generate interrupts when they need attention.  This might seem
     inefficient and counterintuitive, but when done properly, polling gives
     more control to the operating system on when and how to handle devices,
     with a number of advantages in terms of system responsiveness and perfor-
     mance.

     In particular, polling reduces the overhead for context switches which is
     incurred when servicing interrupts, and gives more control on the sched-
     uling of the CPU between various tasks (user processes, software inter-
     rupts, device handling) which ultimately reduces the chances of livelock
     in the system.

   Principles of Operation
     In the normal, interrupt-based mode, devices generate an interrupt when-
     ever they need attention.	This in turn causes a context switch and the
     execution of an interrupt handler which performs whatever processing is
     needed by the device.  The duration of the interrupt handler is poten-
     tially unbounded unless the device driver has been programmed with real-
     time concerns in mind (which is generally not the case for FreeBSD driv-
     ers).  Furthermore, under heavy traffic load, the system might be persis-
     tently processing interrupts without being able to complete other work,
     either in the kernel or in userland.

     Device polling disables interrupts by polling devices at appropriate
     times, i.e., on clock interrupts, system calls and within the idle loop.
     This way, the context switch overhead is removed.	Furthermore, the oper-
     ating system can control accurately how much work to spend in handling
     device events, and thus prevent livelock by reserving some amount of CPU
     to other tasks.

     Enabling polling also changes the way software network interrupts are
     scheduled, so there is never the risk of livelock because packets are not
     processed to completion.

   MIB Variables
     The operation of polling is controlled by the following sysctl(8) MIB
     variables:

     kern.polling.enable
	     If set to non-zero, polling is enabled.  Default is disabled.

     kern.polling.user_frac
	     When polling is enabled, and provided that there is some work to
	     do, up to this percent of the CPU cycles is reserved to userland
	     tasks, the remaining fraction being available for polling pro-
	     cessing.  Default is 50.

	     packets, going round-robin among all interfaces registered for
	     polling.  This prevents the case that a large burst from a single
	     interface can saturate the IP interrupt queue
	     (net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen).  Default is 5.

     kern.polling.burst_max
	     Upper bound for kern.polling.burst.  Note that when polling is
	     enabled, each interface can receive at most (HZ * burst_max)
	     packets per second unless there are spare CPU cycles available
	     for polling in the idle loop.  This number should be tuned to
	     match the expected load (which can be quite high with GigE
	     cards).  Default is 150 which is adequate for 100Mbit network and
	     HZ=1000.

     kern.polling.idle_poll
	     Controls if polling is enabled in the idle loop.  There are no
	     reasons (other than power saving or bugs in the scheduler's han-
	     dling of idle priority kernel threads) to disable this.  Note
	     that -CURRENT apparently has some problems in this respect now,
	     so default is disabled.

     kern.polling.poll_in_trap
	     Controls if polling is enabled during hardware traps.  Enabling
	     this can be useful to improve the network responsiveness of boxes
	     with 100% CPU usage.  Default is disabled.

     kern.polling.reg_frac
	     Controls how often (every reg_frac / HZ seconds) the status reg-
	     isters of the device are checked for error conditions and the
	     like.  Increasing this value reduces the load on the bus, but
	     also delays the error detection.  Default is 20.

     kern.polling.handlers
	     How many active devices have registered for polling.

     kern.polling.short_ticks
     kern.polling.lost_polls
     kern.polling.pending_polls
     kern.polling.residual_burst
     kern.polling.phase
     kern.polling.suspect
     kern.polling.stalled
	     Debugging variables.

SUPPORTED DEVICES

     Device polling requires explicit modifications to the device drivers.  As
     of this writing, the dc(4), em(4), fwe(4), fwip(4), fxp(4), ixgb(4),
     nge(4), re(4), rl(4), sf(4), sis(4), ste(4), vge(4), and vr(4) devices
     are supported, with others in the works.  The modifications are rather
     straightforward, consisting in the extraction of the inner part of the
     interrupt service routine and writing a callback function, *_poll(),
     which is invoked to probe the device for events and process them.	(See
     the conditionally compiled sections of the devices mentioned above for
     more details.)

     As in the worst case the devices are only polled on clock interrupts, in
     order to reduce the latency in processing packets, it is advisable to
     increase the frequency of the clock to at least 1000 HZ.

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