[PATCH 0/3] Net fix and improvements

[Glenn Washburn]

The first patch looks like it was a copy/paste error. If the net module is
unloaded, grub_net_poll_cards_idle should be NULL so that a function in the
net module which now doesn't exist.

The second and third patches are for performance and were helpful when
debugging GRUB. When the net module is loaded, even if there are no net
cards found, grub_net_poll_cards_idle will call grub_net_tcp_retransmit()
unconditionally. But there's no need to go through tcp retransmit logic if
there aren't any cards that we could be retransmitting on.

As for the third patch, if the machine has network cards found, but there are
no tcp open sockets (because the user doesn't use the network to boot), then
grub_net_tcp_retransmit() should be a noop. Thus is doesn't need to call
grub_get_time_ms(), which does a call into firmware on powerpc-ieee1275. So
only call grub_get_time_ms() if there are tcp sockets.

Calls to grub_net_poll_cards_idle can happen a lot when GRUB is waiting for a
keypress (grub_getkey_noblock calls grub_net_poll_cards_idle). I found this
annoying when debugging an issue in GRUB with GDB and I found that nearly
every time I interrupted GRUB with the GDB I was landing in OpenBIOS's
milliseconds call and then I had to step out back into GRUB which could be
a hundred or more instructions. This reduces the probability that interrupting
GRUB lands in the firmware when GRUB is blocked waiting on a keypress.

Glenn

Glenn Washburn (3):
  net: Unset grub_net_poll_cards_idle when net module has been unloaded
  net: Avoid unnecessary calls to grub_net_tcp_retransmit
  net/tcp: Only call grub_get_time_ms when there are sockets to
    potentially retransmit for

 grub-core/net/net.c | 5 +++--
 grub-core/net/tcp.c | 9 +++++++--
 2 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

-- 
2.27.0