> With stateless offloading schemes? Absolutely it is possible. > > Even without stateless offloading, if it can't be done today, then > they will soon. > > This is what has always happened in the past, people were preaching > for TOE back when 100Mbit ethernet was "new and fast". But you > certainly don't see anyone trying to justify TOE for those link > speeds today. The same will happen for 1Gbit and 10Gbit links > a year or so from now, the cpu, memory, and PCI bus will be fast > enough.
Sure, today's technology has no issue with handling 1992 network speeds. > TOE is therefore by definition a technology which we know will will > be deprecated for current link technologies over time. It is a > specialized hack, and once it's in we can never take it out of > the kernel. Why put in a specialized hack when the fully functional, > fully featureful, general purpose net stack is "good enough"? Can you explain why TOE is a hack while stateless offload is not? It is actually surprising that few seem to be concerned with what LSO and LRO do to TCP. Don't they both change the dynamics of TCP in non- standard ways? Doesn't this go against Linux's tradition of being the most RFC compliant of all stacks? LSO, for one, breaks TCP's clock, increases the sender's burstiness, disrupts congestion control, and only works in a lossless environment. Has anyone studied the impact of LSO on network congestion? Who has sanctioned its widespread use? A TOE must provide a fully standards compliant stack, which does not break TCP or change its behavior on the wire like stateless offload does. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
