October 2017
Intermediate to advanced
586 pages
14h 8m
English
Content preview from Linux Device Drivers Development
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Packet handling
Packet handling consists of the transmission and reception of packets. This is the main task of any network interface driver. Transmission refers only to sending outgoing frames, whereas reception refers to frames coming in.
There are two ways to drive networking data exchange: by polling or by interrupting. Polling, which is a kind of timer-driven interrupt, consists of a kernel continuously checking at given intervals for any change to the device. On the other hand, the interrupt mode consists of the kernel doing nothing, listening to an IRQ line, and waiting for the device to notify a change, by means of the IRQ. Interrupt-driven data exchange can increase system overhead during times of high traffic; that is why some drivers ...