This must be that new extra-strong cough sirup...
WHY, oh WHY can we not have something that's a *DUMB* OSA?
Our CPU's are too expensive to be bothered with ARP. I don't want to wake up otherwise idle penguins to ask whether they have recent knowledge about MAC addresses (they were not working so they have no recent interesting knowledge about anything). And I certainly don't want them to listen to the ARP reply and wake up again in a minute only to purge that item from their cache. I rather offload this work to the OSA card.
I recall from tests that the cost of getting all broadcast traffic on a moderately quiet LAN was about 5 times the cost of the 100 Hz timer tick. Go figure what would happen if OSA would copy the packets to everyone.
And I don't want the penguins to waste time discussing routing amongst themselves when there is only one way out anyway. If some more work is needed for routing, then I want one virtual machine to do that for all.
Oh, and if you would try you it you would find that the LCS driver can very well keep up with Fast Ethernet (and beyond until it was throttled). And it does so very cheap.
Rob
