USERSPACE:
1. add support for devices with different number of rx and tx queues;
2. add better support for zero-copy operation, adding an extra field
to the netmap ring to indicate how many buffers we have already processed
but not yet released (with help from Eddie Kohler);
3. The two changes above unfortunately require an API change, so while
at it add a version field and some spares to the ioctl() argument
to help detect mismatches.
4. update the manual page for the two changes above;
5. update sample applications in tools/tools/netmap
KERNEL:
1. simplify the internal structures moving the global wait queues
to the 'struct netmap_adapter';
2. simplify the functions that map kring<->nic ring indexes
3. normalize device-specific code, helps mainteinance;
4. start exploring the impact of micro-optimizations (prefetch etc.)
in the ixgbe driver.
Use 'legacy' descriptors on the tx ring and prefetch slots gives
about 20% speedup at 900 MHz. Another 7-10% would come from removing
the explict calls to bus_dmamap* in the core (they are effectively
NOPs in this case, but it takes expensive load of the per-buffer
dma maps to figure out that they are all NULL.
Rx performance not investigated.
I am postponing the MFC so i can import a few more improvements
before merging.