Over time there has been an increase in the number of features that NICs provide, to the point where we are at now with some providing full TOEs. So far there has been little in the way of knobs to turn things on or off with, aside from do_hwcksum.
Something that might provide food for thought about what sort of knobs we do need is how well those TOEs play with other network components. For example, if there is an interoperability problem with the TOE on a NIC and some HBA, how do we manage that? How do we disable use of the TOE on a card until a firmware upgrade is available for it? And what sort of extra observability does that NIC need in order to allow diagnosing problems with traffic flow between it and the HBA? If snoop and /dev/net are providing us with a view of traffic that is between IP and the driver, how do we get a look at what the NIC is really sending? btw, the above comments about problems between a TOE and HBA are not speculative in nature... Darren _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
