*BSD News Article 74097


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From: iialan@iifeak.swan.ac.uk (Alan Cox)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.networking,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: TCP latency
Date: 18 Jul 1996 10:09:16 GMT
Organization: Institute For Industrial Information Technology
Lines: 26
Message-ID: <4sl2gc$jf6@news.swan.ac.uk>
References: <31E995B6.573A3461@lambert.org> <4schqh$ssa@panix2.panix.com> <31E9E122.190E8C64@lambert.org>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.networking:45654 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:4107 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:23903

In article <31E9E122.190E8C64@lambert.org> Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> writes:
>Using DMA devices for disk and nework I/O, and having a unified
>VM cache, the cost will be:
>
>	1 DMA from disk to memory (you have to do this anyway)
>	1 page offset mapping
>        1 copy for header data
>        1 DMA from memory to network (you have to do this anyway)
>
>This should save you several copies over FreeBSD, at least one
>more copy over Linux (which has user space NFS), and additional

No because the Linux NFSD is mmap()ing the pages for the file I/O. You've
also ignored a nasty little detail PC network cards don't do for you which
is a single pass over memory cost for checksum computation (unless you 
have something really cute in your cards DMA engine).

BTW: On PCI bus you also don't in theory have to do the disk to memory
DMA, you can DMA stuff between cards according to the spec.

Alan
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