Re: Alan Shih: "TCP IP Offloading Interface"

Jesse Pollard
2003-07-15T12:41:33Z

On Monday 14 July 2003 14:26, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 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

Not to mention the problems IPSec would have with such a device.