From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263315AbTGOFqK (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2003 01:46:10 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263355AbTGOFqK (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2003 01:46:10 -0400 Received: from pizda.ninka.net ([216.101.162.242]:32464 "EHLO pizda.ninka.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263205AbTGOFp6 (ORCPT ); Tue, 15 Jul 2003 01:45:58 -0400 Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 22:51:33 -0700 From: "David S. Miller" To: "Jordi Ros" Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-net@vger.kernel.org, netdev@oss.sgi.com, alan@storlinksemi.com Subject: Re: TCP IP Offloading Interface Message-Id: <20030714225133.18395b69.davem@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.2 (GTK+ 1.2.6; sparc-unknown-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, 14 Jul 2003 22:42:55 -0700 "Jordi Ros" wrote: [ Please fix Outlook Express or whatever lame email client you use to put newlines into the emails that you compose. These excessive long lines make your emails nearly impossible to read ] > TCP offloading does not necessarily need to be the goal but a MUST > if one wants to build a performance-scalable architecture. This > vision is in fact introduced by Mogul in his paper. He writes: > "Therefore, offloading the transport layer becomes valuable not for > its own sake, but rather because that allows offloading of the RDMA > [...]". I totally disagree. It is not a MUST, in fact I have described an alternative implementation that requires none of the complexity or RDMA, and none of the stupidity of TOE. Read my lips: "We do not need to offload TCP itself to get the attributes you desire, therefore we are NOT going to do it." You can choose to ignore my suggestions and likewise I will continue to ignore the endless (and frankly, broing after reading it for the 100th time) spouting from people like you that we somehow "NEED" or "MUST" have TOE, which is complete bullshit as exemplified by my alternative example scheme. You also ignore the points others have made that the systems HAVE SCALED to evolving networks technologies as they have become faster and faster. And when you ignore me, don't be surprised when other companies come along, implement my scheme, it gets supported in Linux and subsequently the stock of your company effectively becomes toilet paper and TOE is an obscure piece of computing history gone wrong :-) > TOE is believed to not provide performance. I may agree that TOE by > itself may not, but TOE as a means to deliver some other technology > (e.g. RDMA, encryption or Direct Path) it does optimize (in some > instance dramatically) the overall performance. Let me show you the > numbers in our Direct Path technology. But our point is that you don't need any of this crap. My RX receive page accumulation scheme handles all of the receive side problems with touching the data and getting into the filesystem and then the device. With my scheme you can receive the data, go direct to the device, and the cpu never touches one byte. > Note that Microsoft is considering TOE under its Scalable Networking > Program. To keep linux competitive, I would encourage a healthy > discussion on this matter I actually welcome Microsoft falling into this rathole of a technology. Let them have to support that crap and have to field bug reports on it, having to wonder who created the packets. And let them deal with the negative effects TOE has on connection rates and things like that. Linux will be competitive, especially if people develop the scheme I have described several times into the hardware. There are vendors doing this, will you choose to be different and ignore this?