Abstract
CPUs monitor the network interface by spin-loop polling or by the use of interrupts. Spin-loop polling delivers high performance but consumes significant amounts of power and generates heat. The use of interrupts is less power hungry but causes substantial latency.
This disclosure describes techniques that introduce, for certain CPU requests, a bounded (<10 μs or so) delay in the return of a completion packet from the peripheral device to the CPU. This reduces the energy spent by the CPU on read/compare/repeat loops and enables operations like direct memory access to get more bandwidth while retaining the high performance of spin-loop polling. The techniques leverage the multiple-outstanding-transactions and out-of-order completions features of the PCIe (or similar) buses to achieve zero or near-zero delay penalties while substantially mitigating the power and thermal consequences of spin-loop polling.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
N/A, "Poll-optimized adaptation of PCI-express", Technical Disclosure Commons, (August 16, 2019)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/2406