> -----Original Message----- > From: Christoph Lameter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, August 21, 2005 9:28 AM > To: David S. Miller > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Leonid Grossman; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; > [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; > [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [PATCH] TCP Offload (TOE) - Chelsio >
> And -by the way- it seems that LRO is patented. Hope you made > arrangements for Linux to use that technology? Are others > vendors allowed to implement LRO in their hardware? > Ahh, I was curious to see if someone will bring this argument up - in fact, LRO legal issues do not exist, while TOE legal issues are quite big at the moment. I guess this is one of the reasons why OpenRDMA and other mainstream industry efforts don't have any provisions for TOE support. As I mentioned in Ottawa, there is indeed a patent application filed about a year ago for Neterion basic LRO implementation. Linux doesn't need any arrangements to support basic LRO - it will work in Linux today without any OS changes. All it needs from the stack is the ability to accept chained skb that is bigger than advetrized MTU, and this works in Linux stack already. Potential TCP loss response algorithm and other changes that David is talking about will be beneficial, and these are obviously not covered by the Neterion application. Anyways, since the application is not granted yet it's probably too early to discuss it's future - but if any vendor wants to have peace of mind, we can talk and get this out of the way; we are obviously motivated to make LRO a de-facto NIC feature (much like TSO and other stateless offloads have become). Unlike LRO, TOE is covered by number of existing patents and faces fundamental legal challenges as we speak, for both OS vendors and IHVs - as recent Alacritech/Microsoft/Broadcom lawsuit and settlement just clearly demonstrated :-) - 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
