have alignment problems.
On small boxes (e.g. the net4501 from Soekris, featuring a 486/133)
this provides huge performance benefits: the peak forwarding rate
with avg.sized packets goes up by 50-70% because of this change
alone. Faster CPUs might benefit less from this change, but in any
case the CPU has better things to do than waste time on useless
memory-to-memory copies.
Several drivers (for Tulip-like cards) might benefit from a similar
change.
Right now the new behaviour is controlled by a sysctl variable,
hw.sis_quick which defaults to 1 (on), you can set it to 0 to
reintroduce the old behaviour (and compare the results). The
variable is only there to show how much you can gain with this
change, it will go away soon.
Also, slightly simplify the code to initialize the ring buffers,
and remove a couple of dangerous printf's which could trigger on
any packet in case of mbuf shortage.
MFC-after: 3 days
920dcd3fcb