Re: Alan Shih: "TCP IP Offloading Interface"

From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
To: David griego <dagriego@hotmail.com>
Cc: alan@storlinksemi.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Alan Shih: "TCP IP Offloading Interface"
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 15:26:50 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <3F1303FA.8080706@pobox.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <Sea2-F50x3G5aYY61LE00011019@hotmail.com>

David griego wrote:
> How does one measure the reliability and security of current software 
> TCP/IP stacks?  Some standard set of test would have to be identified 
> and the TOEs would need to be tested against this to ensure that they 
> meet some minimum standard.  I would suggest offloading the minimum 
> amount from the OS so that most of the control could be maintaind by the 
> OS stack.  This also would make failover/routing changes between TOE 
> -TOE, and TOE-NIC easier.

Anything beyond basic host-only TOE adds massive complexity for very 
little gain:  interfacing netfilter and routing code with a black box we 
_hope_ will act properly sounds like suicide.

 >  Current offloads such as checksum and
> segmentation will not be enough for 10GbE processing, so it would have 
> to be something more than we have today.

All this is vague handwaving without supporting evidence.  So far we get 
stuff like Internet2 speed records _without_ TOE.  And Linux currently 
supports 10gige...  and hosts are just going to keep getting faster and 
faster.

	Jeff