This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
3.12 ifinit Function
After the interface structures are initialized and linked together, main (Figure 3.23) calls ifinit, shown in Figure 3.42.
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Figure 3.42. ifinit function.
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The for loop traverses the interface list and sets the maximum size of each interface output queue to 50 (ifqmaxlen) if it hasn't already been set by the interface's attach function.
An important consideration for the size of the output queue is the number of packets required to send a maximum-sized datagram. For Ethernet, if a process calls sendto with 65,507 bytes of data, it is fragmented into 45 fragments and each fragment is put onto the interface output queue. If the queue were much smaller, the process could never send that large a datagram, as the queue wouldn't have room.
if_slowtimo starts the interface watchdog timers. When an interface timer expires, the kernel calls the watchdog function for the interface. An interface can reset the timer periodically to prevent the watchdog function from being called, or set if_timer to 0 if the watchdog function is not needed. Figure 3.43 shows the if_slowtimo function.
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Figure 3.43. if_s1owtimo function.
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The single argument, arg, is not used but is required by the prototype for the slow timeout functions (Section 7.4).
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if_slowtimo ignores interfaces with if_timer equal to 0; if if_timer does not equal 0, if_slowtimo decrements if_timer and calls the if_watchdog function associated with the interface when the timer reaches 0. Packet processing is blocked by splimp during if_slowtimo. Before returning, ip_slowtimo calls timeout to schedule a call to itself in hz/IFNET_SLOWHZ clock ticks, hz is the number of clock ticks that occur in 1 second (often 100). It is set at system initialization and remains constant thereafter. Since IFNET_SLOWHZ is defined to be 1, the kernel calls if_slowtimo once every hz clock ticks, which is once per second.
The functions scheduled by the timeout function are called back by the kernel's callout function. See [Leffler et al. 1989] for additional details.