core dumps on leaf

[Matthew Dillon]

:
:	Why does this problem not appear under FreeBSD?
:
:It does happen in FreeBSD, but you have to catch it at the right
:time.  Since FreeBSD is effectively single-threaded with their
:mutual exclusion locks, this happens much less in FreeBSD.  However
:it also means when we both release the big kernel lock, we'll be
:able to scale to much higher number of processors because we're
:multi-threaded instead of single-threaded in the kernel.
:
:	Is it because of the multi-threaded kernel?
:
:Yes.

    It could also be partially hidden by FreeBSD's priority mechanism,
    but I suspect the primary reason is simply the fact that their network
    is 'interrupt driven', i.e. not multi-threaded but more
    multi-interrupt-driven, so it is very likely that any pending packets 
    will have been processed by the time mainline kernel code tries to free()
    the interface structure. 

    I suspect the issue will come out of the woodwork for them too at some
    point.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>