A report from the networking miniconference

The right thing to do is not to delay the hardware startup, but instead make the transmission of packets greedy, if there are multiple packets that can be sent at once (up to a byte size limit), send them all.

This avoids the whole area of problems of the media going idle, or of forgetting to call flush in some codepath.

It also adds less latency to the packets (especially if they turn out to be sparse)

If you already have fq_codel or something like it in place to categorize the packets, finding if you have more packets that you can combine should be a lot easier.