On Tue, Sep 29, 2015 at 12:12 AM, David Woodhouse <dw...@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2015-09-28 at 20:04 -0700, Tom Herbert wrote:
>>
>> > I've been pondering a bit of a redesign in this space. I think the
>> > skb struct should be explicit in its instructions to hardware for
>> > which offloads to do for each packet.
>> >
>> > In this way, the stack would be *directly* telling the drivers what to
>> > do (and what not to do), solving all sorts of bugs and really improving
>> > driver reliability and implementation.
>> >
>> Doesn't CHECKSUM_PARTIAL with csum_offset and csum_start already tell
>> the driver unambiguously what to do wrt checksum offload?
>
> Right. That's precisely what we *do* have. But as things stand, we
> can't *use* it to its full capability.
>
> It's fine for decent devices which can handle such explicit
> instructions (advertised by the NETIF_F_HW_CSUM feature).
>
> The problem is the crappy devices that can *only* checksum UDP and TCP
> frames, advertised with the NETIF_F_IP{V6,}_CSUM features. We make a
> primitive attempt *not* to feed arbitrary checksum requests to such
> hardware. But we fail — we end up feeding *all* Legacy IP packets to a
> NETIF_F_IP_CSUM device, and *all* IPv6 packets to a NETIF_F_IPV6_CSUM
> device, regardless of whether they're *actually* TCP or UDP packets.
>
Please look at ixgbe_tx_csum in ixgbe driver. This one example of how
a driver can determine whether the checksum being offloaded is TCP or
UDP. The bug in this driver is that skb_checksum_help is not called
for a protocol the driver isn't looking for. In particular, I believe
this driver will probably send packets with invalid checksums when
TCP/UDP is used with IPv6 packets that contain extension headers.
Tom
> That's the problem I'm trying to solve. And then we *can* make full use
> of the generic checksum offload (I had it working for ICMPv6 at one
> point: http://lists.openwall.net/netdev/2013/01/14/38 ).
>
> --
> David Woodhouse Open Source Technology Centre
> david.woodho...@intel.com Intel Corporation
>
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