Mbufs stored in RX queues

[vincent%labri.fr@localhost]

       Hi,

I'm currently rewriting a MAC driver, and was wondering why in many
drivers there is a queue of mbufs allocated during init for RX which
will be in "external storage" mode.
(Of course, if the DMA engine is smart enough to fill mbufs internally,
they have to be in the queue beforehand, but it's not my case.)

The RX interrupt will usually proceed like this:

1. allocate new mbuf; if impossible, drop packet
2. fill "old" mbuf in rxq
3. put new mbuf in rxq
4. pass old mbuf to upper layer (which frees it)

(with bus_dma incantations interspersed)

It looks to me that holding a number of mbufs in the rxq is useless
since anyway we will fail to keep the incoming packet if we can't
allocate a new mbuf when the packet arrives.

Could anyone please help me see when this could be useful? From my
perspective, it looks like passing up a freshly allocated mbuf would
make us spend exactly the same amount of time in the interrupt handler,
waste less memory, and simplify the code.

I could buy that switching between two mbufs would reduce a bit latency
to the upper layer because one operation can be done to prepare the new
mbuf after the old mbuf has been passed up.

You can look for example at nfe_rxeof() in dev/pci/if_nfe.c but I picked
it randomly with a few other drivers and it seemed like a habit.

Regards,
 Aymeric