TCP IP Offloading

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Oct 07, 2011 at 12:41:59PM -0400, William Muriithi wrote:
> Hmm, I was drunk I think, my bad. Have no idea where TSE came from, I
> meant TSO I believe
> 
> That being said, TSE could mean "TCP segmentation Enable "
> 
> See
> 
> www.cs.usfca.edu/~cruse/cs686s08/lesson22.ppt
> 
> I see.  I was under impression TSO and TOE are the same thing. I was
> therefore nervous that enabling TSO would have triggered the problems
> discussed on the kernel mailing list
> 
> Actually, it would not have been fun moving to IPv6   if TOE had taken
> off as I believe that would have meant replacing the NIC cards,

My understanding is that TSO means the kernel can take a chunk of 50KB
data, and tell the network card "Take this data, spit out frames of 1500
bytes, with this header, starting at this sequence number.  Go!".

TOE means having an entire TCP/IP stack in the network card and having
issues with keeping it in sync with the kernels network stack.  This tends
to mean QoS, traffic shaping, packet filtering, etc all stop working.
And yes if there is a bug in the network stack in the card, you can't
easily fix it.  That is why the linux kernel won't support TOE.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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