Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S272330AbTHEBiO (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 21:38:14 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S272332AbTHEBiO (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 21:38:14 -0400 Received: from almesberger.net ([63.105.73.239]:33798 "EHLO host.almesberger.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S272330AbTHEBiM (ORCPT ); Mon, 4 Aug 2003 21:38:12 -0400 Date: Mon, 4 Aug 2003 22:38:01 -0300 From: Werner Almesberger To: David Lang Cc: "Ihar 'Philips' Filipau" , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: TOE brain dump Message-ID: <20030804223800.P5798@almesberger.net> References: <20030804170921.O5798@almesberger.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: ; from david.lang@digitalinsight.com on Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 01:24:19PM -0700 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1876 Lines: 45 David Lang wrote: > you missed Alan's point, he was saying you don't do TOE on the NIC, Only as far as "traditional TOE" is concerned. My idea is precisely to avoid treating TOE as a special case. > just add another CPU to your main system and use non-TOE NIC's the way you > do today. For a start, that may be good enough, even though you miss a lot of nice hardware optimizations. > Any time you create a cluster of machines you want to create som nice > administrative interfaces for them to maintain your own sanity You've got a point there. The question is whether these interface really cover everything we need, and - more importantly - whether they still have the same semantics. > Larry McVoy has the right general idea when he says buy another box to do > the job, he is just missing the idea that there are some advantages of > coupling the cluster more tightly then you can do with a seperate box. Clusters are nice, but they don't help if your bottleneck is per-packet processing overhead with a single NIC, or if you can't properly distribute the applications. I'm not saying that TOE, even if done in a maintainable way, is always the right approach. E.g. if all you need is a fast path to main memory, Dave's flow cache would be a much cheaper solution. If you can distribute the workload, and the extra hardware doesn't bother you, your clusters become attractive. - Werner -- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina werner@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/