Chained vs. shared EtherNEC interrupts - was: Re: [SOLVED] Re: ARAnyM VMs with Debian hanging at 100% CPU usage

[Michael Schmitz <schmitzmic@gmail.com>]

Thorsten, Geert:

>>> I hear you - and I am still working on sanitizing the driver's
>>> interrupt use.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Oh, sounds like fun. Good luck! (ragnar76 is the one in need of
>> such drivers, he'd probably help testing, too.)
>>
>>
>
> Looks like I may have something working that will require a minimum of
> changes to the ne.c driver -
> need to run a few last tests though.

Looks like it sort of works - but now I'm stuck at the very same point
that got me
to playing tricks with shared interrupts in the first place: the
interrupt watchdog
kicks in and disables the eip_interrupt handler.

The good news: sharing the timer interrupt with other devices (USB
function on NetUSBee) is trival.

And the EtherNEC still functions even after its interrupts have been
disabled - how that works is a
bit of a mystery to me, but who am I to argue with serendipity?
Latency mushrooms to 50ms, and
data rate drops from 70k/sec to 20k/sec but it's still alive.

Geert - can we do anything other than using noirqdebug = 1 to ensure
this doesn't impact on network
performance?

Cheers,

  Michael