This change intends to run the whole network stack in softint context
(or normal LWP), not hardware interrupt context. Note that the work is
still incomplete by this change; to that end, we also have to softint-ify
if_link_state_change (and bpf) which can still run in hardware interrupt.
This change softint-ifies at ifp->if_input that is called from
each device driver (and ieee80211_input) to ensure Layer 2 runs
in softint (e.g., ether_input and bridge_input). To this end,
we provide a framework (called percpuq) that utlizes softint(9)
and percpu ifqueues. With this patch, rxintr of most drivers just
queues received packets and schedules a softint, and the softint
dequeues packets and does rest packet processing.
To minimize changes to each driver, percpuq is allocated in struct
ifnet for now and that is initialized by default (in if_attach).
We probably have to move percpuq to softc of each driver, but it's
future work. At this point, only wm(4) has percpuq in its softc
as a reference implementation.
Additional information including performance numbers can be found
in the thread at tech-kern@ and tech-net@:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2016/01/14/msg019997.html
Acknowledgment: riastradh@ greatly helped this work.
Thank you very much!