Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S267601AbUIOVpu (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:45:50 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S267614AbUIOVon (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:44:43 -0400 Received: from darkwing.uoregon.edu ([128.223.142.13]:4758 "EHLO darkwing.uoregon.edu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S267595AbUIOVlo (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:41:44 -0400 Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:41:05 -0700 (PDT) From: Joel Jaeggli X-X-Sender: joelja@twin.uoregon.edu To: David Stevens cc: Netdev , leonid.grossman@s2io.com, Linux Kernel Subject: Re: The ultimate TOE design In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2511 Lines: 52 On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, 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. I's like to amplify this, adding more general purpose cpu to a machine strikes me as the right design choice since they're simply more generally useful than dedicated cpu's. look at linux software raid compared to the alternatives, frankly I haven't seen a hardware controller that can touch it for performance given a similar number of disks and interfaces... Currently graphcas card have substantionaly more memory bandwidth and pipelines than most general purpose cpu's but eventually that won't be the case. as it is gpus still represent the biggest chunk of independat computational power in a and at least on the server side we don't even use them. > 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? Between hyper-transport tunnels, pci-x, pci-express and infinband, the bottlnecks between the cpu core and the perhiperals and memory are falling away at a rapid clip even as cpu's get faster. we're in a much better position to build balanced systems then we were 2 years ago. > Why don't we off-load filesystems to disks instead? Or a graphics > card that implements X ? :-) I'd rather have shared system resources-- > more flexible. :-) > > +-DLS > > - > 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/ > -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2 - 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/