Re: Tcp/ip offload card driver

David S. Miller
2002-05-10T15:19:50Z

From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 11:12:10 -0400

Linux TCP implementation will always be more powerful and more flexible
than any NIC, too. I doubt they have netlink and netfilter on NICs, for
example :)

It has the same problem as proprietary implementations of the BSD
stack, same bugs and same enhancements done N-times instead of once.

Anyone who thinks that having a different TCP implementation on each
different kind of network card installed on your system is sane, would
you please pass it on brotha so I can smoke some of it too! :-)

On a more serious note, it might be at some level considerable (the
maintainence nightmare et al.) if there was some real life
demonstrable performance gain with current systems.

For example, do a SpecWEB run with TUX both using on-chip-TCP and
without, same networking card. Show a demonstrable gain from the
on-chip-TCP implementation. I bet you can't. If you can make such a
claim using a setup that other people could reproduce themselves by
buying your card and running the test, I'll eat all of my words.