We were frequently dropping packets when downloading large files.
Then we had to wait for TCP retransmission which slowed things down.
This patch dramatically improves E1000 throughput by increasing the
number of RX/TX buffers from 32/8 to 256/256.
The largest chunk of JavaScript from Discord now downloads in roughly
1 second instead of 7 seconds. :^)
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
