Re: [lwip-users] lwIP reentrancy issues and TCP

[Simon Goldschmidt]

First, please make sure you create a mail for a new thread instead of replying 
to an old mail and simply changing the subject: this confuses my mail app since 
it sorts by thread Id, not by subject.

Peter Montgomery <address@hidden> wrote:
> Is lwIP really engineered so that the most logical situation (incoming TCP 
> handled in the interrupt handler, "tcp_write" called from the foreground) is 
> not allowed?

Yes, it is. (BTW, it might be the most logical situation to you, but that's not 
really an objective statement.) The reason for this is that the core lwIP code 
is only supposed to implement the networking code, not the interface to your 
hardware, OS, or timing requirements. Depending on whether lwIP is the highest 
priority software in your application or only low priority, you need to handle 
this differently.

The original intention behind lwIP was to run without an OS and to let the 
Ethernet RX interrupt set a flag when new packets arrive. Then, the main loop 
has to check this flag and pull packets off the hardware, feeding them into the 
stack. This way, you may also call into the stack from the main code, as 
interrupts do not use lwIP.

In this mode, timer functions are also executed from the main loop by checking 
a timer value, not from a timer ISR.

Unfortunately, the stellaris code is a bad example here in that it calls into 
lwIP from interrupt level. This is confusing for lwIP beginners, since it can 
easily lead to concurrency problems when using lwIP from the main loop, too (or 
from other interrupt levels).

> Even with "SYS_LIGHTWEIGHT_PROT " set to 1 ?  Shouldn't the lightweight 
> protection be the kind of thing that handles this?  If not, what are the 
> situations that "SYS_LIGHTWEIGHT_PROT" handles?

Currently, it provides concurrency protection for allocating and reallocating 
memory or pbufs only. By design, it cannot provide what you want: you would 
have to disable the interrupt while calling into lwIP to provide such kind of 
protection. To me, that's not "LIGHTWEIGHT" :-)

Passing received packets into lwIP at interrupt level is generally only a good 
idea if you do need minimal latency between RX and TX. For all other scenarios, 
the original approach should be favored.

> 
Simon