[gPXE] Interrupt vs polling for network device driver.

[Joshua Oreman]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Sivakumar Subramani
<Sivakumar.Subramani at neterion.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I could see all the network device drivers are using polling functionality
> for processing Tx / Rx packets. Why interrupt is not use for processing Tx
> and Rx packets? Also I could see irq entry point function as part of
> net_device_operations. What is the use of this function?

We use polling because it requires less code, it's less error-prone,
and there's nothing else trying to run when we're using the net
device. The irq entry point is for setting the NIC to *generate*
interrupts; this is used with PXE clients that do their own interrupt
handling.

-- Josh