Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267358AbUIOU2n (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:28:43 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267370AbUIOU1h (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:27:37 -0400 Received: from parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk ([195.92.249.252]:29313 "EHLO www.linux.org.uk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267358AbUIOUZY (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:25:24 -0400 Message-ID: <4148A51F.7030909@pobox.com> Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:25:03 -0400 From: Jeff Garzik User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Stevens CC: Netdev , leonid.grossman@s2io.com, Linux Kernel Subject: Re: The ultimate TOE design References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1512 Lines: 35 David Stevens wrote: > I've never understood why people are so interested in off-loading > networking. Isn't that just a multi-processor system where you can't > use any of the network processor cycles for anything else? And, of > course, to be cheap, the network processor will be slower, and much > harder to debug and update software. Well I do agree there is a strong don't-bother-with-TOE argument: Moore's law, the CPUs (manufactured in vast quantities) will usually However, there are companies are Just Gotta Do TOE... and I am not inclined to assist in any effort that compromises Linux's RFC compliancy or security. Current TOE efforts seem to be of the "shove your data through this black box" variety, which is rather disheartening. Even non-TOE NICs these days have ever-more-complex firmwares. tg3 is a MIPS-based engine for example. > If the PCI bus is too slow, or MTU's too small, wouldn't > it be better to fix those directly and use a fast host processor that can > also do other things when not needed for networking? And why have > memory on a NIC that can't be used by other things? PCI bus tends to be slower than DRAM<->CPU speed, and MTUs across the Internet will be small as long as ethernet enjoys continued success. Jeff - 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/