On Mon, 22 Aug 2005, Bijoy Thomas wrote:

> Can you tell me where in the kernel sources this code is?Also, what is
> the difference between splnet and splsoftnet?

arch/ for i386, code is under sys/arch/i386/i386 and sys/arch/i386/isa.
splnet is the interrupt level of hardware nics. softnet is for the top
half.

any code which touches data that may be modified by a network has to use
splnet. syscalls that touch network data use splsoftnet to prevent the
software interrupt from running after a hardware interrupt, but without
blocking the hardware interrupt.


--
And that's why it doesn't affect the engine performance.