Ahh I see.
Some of the things I talked about in my presentation here in
Berlin at LinuxTAG yesterday can help mitigate the effects.
Most of it revolves around batching, and allowing the driver
to manage the backlog of packets directly when the TX queue
fills up.
In such a case we could batch the TX queue refill, know how many more
TX packets we will queue up to the chip right now, and therefore know
that we can safely set periodic MARK bits and only need to force set
the MARK bit at the very end.
Thanks a lot.
--