From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Miller Subject: Re: Dropping NETIF_F_SG since no checksum feature. Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:36:24 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <20061010.203624.91207079.davem@davemloft.net> References: <20061011002656.GB30093@mellanox.co.il> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: mst@mellanox.co.il, shemminger@osdl.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org, openib-general@openib.org, rolandd@cisco.com Return-path: Received: from dsl027-180-168.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([216.27.180.168]:57542 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1030776AbWJKDgV (ORCPT ); Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:36:21 -0400 To: rdreier@cisco.com In-Reply-To: Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org From: Roland Dreier Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:33:46 -0700 > Michael> My guess was, an extra pass over data is likely to be > Michael> expensive - dirtying the cache if nothing else. But I do > Michael> plan to measure that, and see. > > I don't get it -- where's the extra pass? If you can't compute the > checksum on the NIC then you have to compute sometime it on the CPU > before passing the data to the NIC. Also, if you don't do checksumming on the card we MUST copy the data (be it from a user buffer, or from a filesystem page cache page) into a private buffer since if the data changes the checksum would become invalid, as I mentioned in another email earlier. Therefore, since we have to copy anyways, it always is better to checksum in parallel with the copy. So the whole idea of SG without hw-checksum support is without much merit at all.