Polling watchdog: combining polling and interrupts for efficient message handling
ISCA '96 Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Eliminating receive livelock in an interrupt-driven kernel
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
HIP: hybrid interrupt-polling for the network interface
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Profiling Interrupt Handler Performance through Kernel Instrumentation
ICCD '03 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Design
Understanding The Linux Kernel
Understanding The Linux Kernel
ALS '01 Proceedings of the 5th annual Linux Showcase & Conference - Volume 5
A Robust Device Hybrid Scheme to Improve System Performance in Gigabit Ethernet Networks
LCN '07 Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks
Performance analysis and comparison of interrupt-handling schemes in gigabit networks
Computer Communications
Performance considerations in designing network interfaces
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Comparative packet-forwarding measurement of three popular operating systems
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
Modeling and analysis of PC-based software routers
Computer Communications
vIC: interrupt coalescing for virtual machine storage device IO
USENIXATC'11 Proceedings of the 2011 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference
On Linux starvation of CPU-bound processes in the presence of network I/O
Computers and Electrical Engineering
Adding advanced storage controller functionality via low-overhead virtualization
FAST'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on File and Storage Technologies
Mitigating starvation of Linux CPU-bound processes in the presence of network I/O
Journal of Systems and Software
High performance network virtualization with SR-IOV
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Performance of IP-forwarding of Linux hosts with multiple network interfaces
Journal of Network and Computer Applications
I/O stack optimization for smartphones
USENIX ATC'13 Proceedings of the 2013 USENIX conference on Annual Technical Conference
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The performance of network hosts can be severely degraded when subjected to heavy traffic of today's Gigabit networks. This degradation occurs as a result of the interrupt overhead associated with the high rate of packet arrivals. NAPI, a packet reception mechanism integrated into the latest version of Linux networking subsystem, was designed to improve Linux performance to suit today's Gigabit traffic. NAPI is definitely a major step up from earlier reception mechanisms; however, NAPI has shortcomings and its performance can be further enhanced. A hybrid interrupt-handling scheme, which was recently proposed in Salah et al. [K. Salah, K. El-Badawi, F. Haidari, Performance Analysis and Comparison of Interrupt-Handling Schemes in Gigabit Networks, International Journal of Computer Communications, Elsevier, Amsterdam 30 (17) (2007) 3425-3441], can better improve the performance of Gigabit network hosts. The hybrid scheme switches between interrupt disabling-enabling (DE) and polling (NAPI). In this paper, we present and discuss major changes required to implement such a hybrid scheme in the latest version of Linux kernel 2.6.15. We prove experimentally that the hybrid scheme can significantly improve the performance of general-purpose network desktops or servers running network I/O-bound applications, when subjecting such network hosts to both light and heavy traffic load conditions. The performance is measured and analyzed in terms of throughput, packet loss, latency, and CPU availability.