If we consider netchannels as how Van Jackobson discribed them, then mutext is not needed, since it is impossible to have several readers or writers. But in socket case even if there is only one userspace consumer, that lock must be held to protect against bh (or introduce several queues and complicate a lot their's management (ucopy for example)).
As I recall Van's talk you don't need a lock with a ring buffer if you have a start and end variable pointing to location within ring buffer. He didn't explain this in great depth as it is computer science 101 but here is how I would explain it: Once socket is initialiased consumer is the only one that sets start variable and network driver reads this only. It is the other way around for the end variable. As long as the writes are atomic then you are fine. You only need one ring buffer in this scenario and two atomic variables. Having atomic writes does have overhead but far less than locking semantic. -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html