Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

FreeBSD Man Pages

Man Page or Keyword Search:
Man Architecture
Apropos Keyword Search (all sections) Output format
home | help
POLLING(4)	       FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual		    POLLING(4)

     polling --	device polling support

     options DEVICE_POLLING

     Device polling (polling for brevity) refers to a technique	that lets the
     operating system periodically poll	devices, instead of relying on the
     devices to	generate interrupts when they need attention.  This might seem
     inefficient and counterintuitive, but when	done properly, polling gives
     more control to the operating system on when and how to handle devices,
     with a number of advantages in terms of system responsiveness and perfor-

     In	particular, polling reduces the	overhead for context switches which is
     incurred when servicing interrupts, and gives more	control	on the sched-
     uling of the CPU between various tasks (user processes, software inter-
     rupts, device handling) which ultimately reduces the chances of livelock
     in	the system.

   Principles of Operation
     In	the normal, interrupt-based mode, devices generate an interrupt	when-
     ever they need attention.	This in	turn causes a context switch and the
     execution of an interrupt handler which performs whatever processing is
     needed by the device.  The	duration of the	interrupt handler is poten-
     tially unbounded unless the device	driver has been	programmed with	real-
     time concerns in mind (which is generally not the case for	FreeBSD	driv-
     ers).  Furthermore, under heavy traffic load, the system might be persis-
     tently processing interrupts without being	able to	complete other work,
     either in the kernel or in	userland.

     Device polling disables interrupts	by polling devices at appropriate
     times, i.e., on clock interrupts and within the idle loop.	 This way, the
     context switch overhead is	removed.  Furthermore, the operating system
     can control accurately how	much work to spend in handling device events,
     and thus prevent livelock by reserving some amount	of CPU to other	tasks.

     Enabling polling also changes the way software network interrupts are
     scheduled,	so there is never the risk of livelock because packets are not
     processed to completion.

   Enabling polling
     Currently only network interface drivers support the polling feature.  It
     is	turned on and off with help of ifconfig(8) command.

   MIB Variables
     The operation of polling is controlled by the following sysctl(8) MIB

	     When polling is enabled, and provided that	there is some work to
	     do, up to this percent of the CPU cycles is reserved to userland
	     tasks, the	remaining fraction being available for polling pro-
	     cessing.  Default is 50.

	     Maximum number of packets grabbed from each network interface in
	     each timer	tick.  This number is dynamically adjusted by the ker-
	     nel, according to the programmed user_frac, burst_max, CPU	speed,
	     and system	load.

	     The burst above is	split into smaller chunks of this number of
	     packets, going round-robin	among all interfaces registered	for
	     polling.  This prevents the case that a large burst from a	single
	     interface can saturate the	IP interrupt queue
	     (net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen).  Default is 5.

	     Upper bound for kern.polling.burst.  Note that when polling is
	     enabled, each interface can receive at most (HZ * burst_max)
	     packets per second	unless there are spare CPU cycles available
	     for polling in the	idle loop.  This number	should be tuned	to
	     match the expected	load (which can	be quite high with GigE
	     cards).  Default is 150 which is adequate for 100Mbit network and

	     Controls if polling is enabled in the idle	loop.  There are no
	     reasons (other than power saving or bugs in the scheduler's han-
	     dling of idle priority kernel threads) to disable this.

	     Controls how often	(every reg_frac	/ HZ seconds) the status reg-
	     isters of the device are checked for error	conditions and the
	     like.  Increasing this value reduces the load on the bus, but
	     also delays the error detection.  Default is 20.

	     How many active devices have registered for polling.

	     Legacy MIB, that was used to enable or disable polling globally.
	     Currently if set to 1, polling is enabled on all capable inter-
	     faces.  If	set to 0, polling is disabled on all interfaces.

	     Debugging variables.

     Device polling requires explicit modifications to the device drivers.  As
     of	this writing, the bce(4), bge(4), dc(4), em(4),	fwe(4),	fwip(4),
     fxp(4), ixgb(4), nge(4), re(4), rl(4), sf(4), sis(4), ste(4), vge(4),
     vr(4), and	xl(4) devices are supported, with others in the	works.	The
     modifications are rather straightforward, consisting in the extraction of
     the inner part of the interrupt service routine and writing a callback
     function, *_poll(), which is invoked to probe the device for events and
     process them.  (See the conditionally compiled sections of	the devices
     mentioned above for more details.)

     As	in the worst case the devices are only polled on clock interrupts, in
     order to reduce the latency in processing packets,	it is not advisable to
     decrease the frequency of the clock below 1000 Hz.

     Device polling first appeared in FreeBSD 4.6 and FreeBSD 5.0.

     Device polling was	written	by Luigi Rizzo <>.

FreeBSD	10.1			April 13, 2006			  FreeBSD 10.1


Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:

home | help