Re: Alan Shih: "TCP IP Offloading Interface"

Jeff Garzik
2003-07-14T19:12:14Z

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