Re: Ideas for reducing memory copying and zeroing times

Werner Almesberger (almesber@lrc.epfl.ch)
Tue, 16 Apr 1996 08:19:00 +0200 (MET DST)


Jamie Lokier <jamie@rebellion.co.uk> wrote:
> [ Lots of good ideas ]

For slightly different wording, you may also want to read
ftp://lrcftp.epfl.ch/pub/linux/atm/papers/atm_on_lowend.ps.gz
or have a look at net/atm/mmuio.c in
ftp://lrcftp.epfl.ch/pub/linux/atm/dist/atm-0.10.tar.gz

See http://lrcwww.epfl.ch/linux-atm/ for the general picture.

What's different is that I don't have a zero page cache (no SMP ;-), but
I like that idea), and that I keep write buffers simply locked instead of
giving them to the kernel. To improve the latter, my (untested) free_range
function could be used in operations that are guaranteed to discard all
previous contents (e.g. in read system calls), but I haven't experimented
with that bit yet.

Also, my code only works with the ATM side of networking - the whole IP
stack is a bit more complex, but I think Alan has started working on
that.

- Werner

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