Eliminating receive livelock in an interrupt-driven kernel

Most operating systems use interface interrupts to schedule network tasks. Interrupt-driven sys-tems can provide low overhead and good latency at low oered load, but degrade signicantly at higher arrival rates unless care is taken to prevent several pathologies. These are various forms of receive livelock, in which the system spends all of its time processing interrupts, to the ex-clusion of other necessary tasks. Under extreme conditions, no packets are delivered to the user application or the output of the system. To avoid livelock and related problems, an operating system must schedule network interrupt handling as carefully as it schedules process execution. We modied an interrupt-driven networking implementation to do so; this modication eliminates receive livelock without degrading other aspects of system performance. Our modications include the use of polling when the system is heavily loaded, while retaining the use of interrupts under lighter load. We present measurements demonstrating the success of our approach