From: Andi Kleen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 02:31:58 +0200
> Playing devil's advocate here: if the packets are processed on > two different CPUs then this could also happen and break the test > case. > > So the test is probably a bit fragile. Good point. > I generally agree it's better to keep this in kernel though. To drive this home even more, I do not believe that the people who advocate pushing NDISC and ARP policy into userspace would be very happy if something like the RAID transformations were moved into userspace and they were not able to access their disks if the RAID transformer process in userspace died. Why is this a relevant analogy? Well, you have physical hard-disks in your computer today, but at some point that device becomes largely superfluous. It makes more sense to have just a cpu with a 10-gigabit ethernet interface incorporated onto the cpu die, and the majority if not all of your disk access is remote. At that point, network access equals disk access. It would be amusing to need to restart such an NDISC/ARP daemon if it were to live on a remote volume. :-) I understand full well that on special purpose network devices this control vs. data plane seperation into userspace might make a lot of sense. But for a general purpose operating system, such as Linux, the greater concern is resiliency to failures and each piece of core functionality you move to userspace is a new potential point of failure. - 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
