Calls to link_up() in the E1000 driver would read the link state
directly from the hardware on every call. This had negative
performance impact in high throughput situations since link_up()
is called every time an IP packet's route is resolved.
This patch takes inspiration from the RTL8139 network adapter where
the link state is stored in a bool and only updated when the hardware
generates an interrupt related to link state change.
After this change I measured a ~9% increase in TCP Tx throughput
using:
cat /dev/zero | nc <host_IP> <host_port> from the Serenity VM to my
host machine