Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Cathy Zhou wrote:
>>>  > > My 10GbE NIC does not do HW VLAN tag insertion/removal (we 
>>> concluded
>>>  > > there was no performance benefit).  On several OSes, I'm forced to
>>>  > > claim the device does HW VLAN tag support (and do tag
>>>  > > insertion/removal in the driver) to gain support for the 4 bytes of
>>>  > > "margin" (1518, 9018), and/or to get the OS to trust that my device
>>>  > > can offload checksum in combination with VLAN frames.
>>>  > >  > Hmm, can we make the assumption that supporting margin of 
>>> greater than 4  > always implies that a driver can handle offload 
>>> checksum for VLAN frames? I  > am not sure whether this is always true.
>>>
>>> Maybe there could be a capability flag for checksum offload in
>>> combination with vlan?  There seem to be plenty of bits free in the
>>> 32-bit cap data for MAC_CAPAB_HCKSUM.
>>>
>>
>> This sounds possible, or at least a similar mechanism is needed to 
>> make sure hardware checksum works fine for VLAN frames.
> 
> Today, checksumming support is not optional, at least for partial 
> checksums.  

Why is that? Assuming a hardware does not know of any VLAN semantics, it 
might be able to do HW checksums for non-VLAN frames but not for VLAN frames.

Thanks
- Cathy

If you claim to support them, you have to do both VLAN and
> regular on outbound.  This means that drivers which can't do this have 
> to do soft checksum in the driver code on transmit.  Kind of a pain in 
> the arse.
> 
> On receive, its no big deal, because any frame can be sent up either 
> with or without a checksum tag, and the OS will figure it out without 
> consulting NIC capabilities.
> 
>    -- Garrett
>>
>> Thanks!
>> - Cathy
> 

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