In overload situations, i.e. when a sender fills up the entire buffer, we land
in situations where the sender receives an ack_avail signal, releases one
packet, allocates and sends a packet and fails to allocate a second packet.
This is especially relevant if the receiver does not batch ack_avail signals
(such as vfs_lwip). In those ping-pong scheduling scenarios, the overhead from
catching the Packet_alloc_failed exception becomes significant. In case of the
NIC router, we will land in an overload situation if the sender is faster than
the receiver. The packet buffer will be filled up at some point and the NIC
router starts to drop packets. For every dropped packet, we currently have to
catch the Packet_alloc_failed exception.
This commit adds a new method alloc_packet_attempt to Packet_stream_source that
has almost the same signature as the older alloc_packet method but returns
an Attempt<Packet_descriptor, Alloc_packet_error> object. As the method already
used the allocator back end exception-less, changes on lower levels were not
needed. Furthermore, the NIC router was modified to use the new exception-less
alloc_packet_attempt instead of alloc_packet.
Ref #4555
e32157e21b