Question on alloc_skb()

Forum: Network Buffers And Memory Management
Keywords: network interface
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 1997 18:16:47 GMT
From: Joern Wohlrab <unknown>

Hi, As I read in that introduction a network device driver has to alloc a sk_buff in it's ISR and this has to happen atomically, isn't it? Well my experiences are that unfortunately it often happens that alloc_skb returns NULL. So my idea was I alloc a few sk_buff's (with GFP_KERNEL flag) in the device drivers open function. The device driver would organize these sk_buff's as ring. Else the device driver must forbid the higher layer to free the sk_buff's. Is this possible just by setting the lock flag inside sk_buff? The only problem with this scheme is when the user process doesn't read frequently from the socket the device driver overrides unread sk_buff data again and the packet order would be destroyed. But let's assume we don't care. So is this plan possible at all? Thank you very much. -- Joern Wohlrab

Messages

1. Re: Question on alloc_skb() by Erik Petersen