rtlplayground: receive on the NIC interrupt instead of polling the buffer

The receive interrupt was wired up but never used: EX1 was enabled, the
handler re-enabled itself and did nothing, and the mask bit for it in the
NIC stayed clear, so idle() read the receive buffer register on every
pass to find out whether a packet had arrived, and slept until the next
tick when none had. A packet that arrived during that sleep waited for
the tick: 2.2 ms on average, 5 ms at worst, for every frame the CPU
handles.

Now the handler latches rx_irq and masks itself, and idle() sleeps
unless a receive, a link change, a console command or the tick is
pending. On rx_irq the loop drains the buffer, clears the status bit and
re-enables EX1, in that order: the NIC holds the line as long as the
status bit is set, and the bit does not clear while the buffer still
holds a frame, so a frame that lands between the last read and EX1 = 1
raises the interrupt again rather than getting lost. The other order,
clearing before draining, left the line asserted and produced an
interrupt on every pass. The mask is written after nic_setup(), which
resets it.

Measured on an RTL8373 board with the same counters in both images,
clocked by the tick counter, traffic from a host behind an LACP trunk:

```
                          polling     interrupt
idle, register ops/s          788            79
25 pps, RTT avg/max     2.19/4.96     0.44/0.75 ms
500 pps, RTT avg/max    2.78/5.06     0.39/5.40 ms
500 pps, loss               0.08%         0.08%
```

The handler compiles to clr EX1 / setb rx_irq / reti.

The timer interrupt now raises a tick flag too, so idle() no longer works
out TICKS_DUE twice per pass, and cmd_available moves from xdata to a
bit. The four wake-up flags sit in the low bits of one byte at 0x20, so
the sleep test is a single read of that byte. tx_buf_empty deliberately
stays out: it is 1 when there is nothing to do, so including it would
keep the sleep test from ever firing.
This commit is contained in:
DrDoof authored and d00f committed 2026-09-23 16:12:32 +02:00
1 parent ac3b4b17ae
commit 6e2701bc8c
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@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
#include "rtl837x_common.h"
extern __xdata uint8_t cmd_buffer[CMD_BUF_SIZE];
extern __xdata uint8_t cmd_available;
extern __bit __at(0x03) cmd_available;
extern __xdata uint8_t err_status;
/* Health instrumentation, built with HEALTH=1. Without it the hooks below