From: Jouni Malinen (jkmaline_at_cc.hut.fi)
Date: 2002-01-18 22:17:09 UTC
On Fri, Jan 18, 2002 at 07:20:11AM +0000, Jerritt Collord wrote:
> Also, don't think this has come up on the list... they do a workaround for
> a prism2 problem... somewhere in their openap-linux-2.4.17.patch:
>
> /* Under extreme load the prism driver appears to spend too long in
> * interrupts and timer bottom halfs don't get run soon enough to
> * prevent the hardware watchdog from rebooting us. This is a hack to
> * ack the watchdog on every time tick. Eventually we want to fix the
> * prism driver so this isn't necessary. */
Host AP driver needs to do quite lot of processing compared to station code for each packet. Current driver does some of this in interrupt handlers to keep code a bit simpler and to avoid increasing latency. I haven't seen any problems with this on my test computers.
Access points have minimal processing power compared to any desktop/laptop.. In these kinds of low-power platforms it might be useful to remove code from interrupt handler even with the cost of added complexity and latency. However, this should not be a problem on any current desktop/laptop computer.
-- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA