> From: Chris Friesen [mailto:cfriesen@nortelnetworks.com]
> 
> William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> 
> > I don't understand why you're obsessed with interrupts. Just run your
> > load and spray the scheduler latency stats out /proc/
> 
> I'm obsessed with interrupts because it gives me a higher sampling rate.
> 
> I could set up and itimer for a recurring 10ms timeout and see how much
extra I
> waited, but then I can only get 100 samples/sec.
> 
> With /dev/rtc (on intel) you can get 20x more samples in the same amount
of time.

Okay, crazy idea here ...

You are talking about a bladed system, right? So probably you
have two network interfaces in there [it should work only with
one too].

What if you rip off the driver for the network interface and 
create a new breed. Set an special link with a null Ethernet
cable and have one machine sending really short Ethernet frames
to the sampling machine.

Maybe if you can manage to get the Ethernet chip to interrupt
every time a new frame arrives, you can use that as a sampling
measure. I'd say the key would be to have the sending machine
be really precise about the sending ... I guess it can be worked
out.

I don't know how fast an interrupt rate you could get, OTOH 
rough numbers ... let's say 100 MBit/s is 10 MByte/s, use
a really small frame [let's say a few bytes only, 32], add
the MACS {I don't remember the frame format, assuming 12 bytes
for source and destination MACs, plus 8 in overhead [again, I
made it up], 52 bytes ... let's round up to 64 bytes per frame.

So

10 MB/s / 64 B/frame = 163840 frames/s

I don't know how really possible is this or my calculations
are screwed up, but it might be worth a try ...

I did a quick test; from one of my computers, m1, I did:

m1:~ $ while true; do cat BIGFILE; done | ssh m2 cat > /dev/null

while on m2, I did:

m2:~ $ grep eth0 /proc/interrupts; sleep 2m; grep eth0 /proc/interrupts
 18:      77457      68483   IO-APIC-level  eth0
 18:     397390     412559   IO-APIC-level  eth0
m2:~ $ 

total    319933  +  344076   = 664009
in 120 seconds ... 664009 / 120 = 5533 Hz ~ 2500 Hz per CPU.

not bad, wouldn't this work?

[this is with a 1500 MTU through a hub ... or a switch, I
don't really know ...]

Iñaky Pérez-González -- Not speaking for Intel -- all opinions are my own
(and my fault)