Very Computer

Hi,

Is there any TCP offload (TOE) card driver available on Linux?

Thanks for the info!

Xiangping Chen
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   Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 10:48:23 -0400

   Is there any TCP offload (TOE) card driver available on Linux?

Why do you want it?  There is no proven performance benefit.

PCI bandwidth is the limiting factor for networking performance.
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   Actually there is. Think iSCSI. Have a look at this article at
LinuxJournal - http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4896 .

/Pedro

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Linux TCP implementation will always be more powerful and more flexible
than any NIC, too.  I doubt they have netlink and netfilter on NICs, for
example :)

    Jeff

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   Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 17:11:55 +0200

      Actually there is. Think iSCSI. Have a look at this article at
   LinuxJournal - http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4896 .

The Linux networking stack need have no hand in any of the IPv4 done
by iSCSI, it can live entirely in the cards firmware and Linux need
not know what the transport looks like at all.
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   Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 11:12:10 -0400

   Linux TCP implementation will always be more powerful and more flexible
   than any NIC, too.  I doubt they have netlink and netfilter on NICs, for
   example :)

It has the same problem as proprietary implementations of the BSD
stack, same bugs and same enhancements done N-times instead of once.

Anyone who thinks that having a different TCP implementation on each
different kind of network card installed on your system is sane, would
you please pass it on brotha so I can smoke some of it too! :-)

On a more serious note, it might be at some level considerable (the
maintainence nightmare et al.) if there was some real life
demonstrable performance gain with current systems.

For example, do a SpecWEB run with TUX both using on-chip-TCP and
without, same networking card.  Show a demonstrable gain from the
on-chip-TCP implementation.  I bet you can't.  If you can make such a
claim using a setup that other people could reproduce themselves by
buying your card and running the test, I'll eat all of my words.
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Ug...  why bother?  Just buy an SMP system at that point...

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And how about when an SMP system isn't enough? Should I have to
re-engineer my network storage architecture when hardware exists that'll
increase throughput if a simple device driver gets written? Don't forget
that with 64 bit PCI that the limit of the bus has been raised, and with
impending technologies like Infiniband and Hypertransport that limit
will be raised again. At that point devoting main processor resources to
something better handled by specialty hardware really stops making
sense, if that specialty hardware is low-cost (oughta be) and effective
(still debatable).

Nicholas Harring
Hostway Corporation

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Quote:>    Actually there is. Think iSCSI. Have a look at this article at
> LinuxJournal - http://linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4896 .

no mention of ANY aspect of their tested configuration or workload.  
in short: zero content marketing fluff.

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   Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 10:51:06 -0500

   And how about when an SMP system isn't enough?

Demonstrate this.

Putting the whole implementation on the cards firmware is feasible,
you don't need SMP.  It's totally doable and Linux needs to see
none of the details.

Franks a lot,
David S. Miller

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One would expect that hyper-transport would make using the cpu more
attractive rather than less since it eleminates many of the shared
resources that are currently bottlenecks in smp machines.

joelja

 On Fri, 10 May

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Obviously some form of driver is necessary to access the device, whether
or not we're pushing fully formed IP packets or raw payload. Or is that
a userland problem and I'm just not understanding the flow from
userspace through the kernel and to the driver properly?

Cheers,
Nicholas Harring

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Depends on what kind of authentication you also need. I haven't seen anything
on that. So far as I know (and that is limited right now) iSCSI doesn't
perform any kind of authentication beyond IP number.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jesse I Pollard, II

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.
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Quote:> Obviously some form of driver is necessary to access the
> device, whether or not we're pushing fully formed IP packets
> or raw payload. Or is that a userland problem and I'm just
> not understanding the flow from userspace through the kernel
> and to the driver properly?
> Cheers,
> Nicholas Harring

Your initial premise seemed to include the offload of TCP
as well. Doesn't that mean:

application -> driver -> card [ creates full TCP/IP pkt ]

TCP is stateful, feature rich and highly configurable.
Do you expect that a fw/hw implementation will provide
an equivalent implementation?  Support for tuning, options,
network taps, diag, bug fixes, feature tweaks, ... ?

Very curious..

thanks,
Nivedita

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Quote:>[...]
> For example, do a SpecWEB run with TUX both using on-chip-TCP and
> without, same networking card.  Show a demonstrable gain from the
> on-chip-TCP implementation.  I bet you can't.

NO! Doing such a test sets you up for a failure. If a vendor
of the card provides an on-chip TCP, it is entirely in the
vendor's interest to penalize regular TCP (for example, by
failing to provide checksum offload or sane S/G segments).

I only consider fair a test of on-chip TCP compared to
the best of the normal NICs.

-- Pete
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