On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:23 PM, Edel SM <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > hello, > > On 3/11/08, fooler mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > you cannot benefit the tcp offloading feature of a nic if you put this > > on your box acting as a router... the basic mechanism of a router is > > to route or forward packets based on the destination address... as the > > packets pass on the router... router will only decrease the ip > > header's ttl value, if the value is zero, it drops the packet and send > > icmp type 11 (time exceeded) back to the sender... if the value is > > non-zero.. recompute and updates the checksum in the ip header and > > forwards on the next hop based on its routing table... > > but the NIC consumes cpu power while it process traffic, right? im > just thinking of offloading (saving) cpu task and put it in the nic w/ > its onboard processor. cheap nics relies on main cpu power, while > better (and expensive) ones have processor onboard.
ill take you to a bigger picture... ill present you moore's law... processing speed.. memory capacity.. bandwidth... etc.. increasingly at exponential rates... your host's processor and memory buffer are much efficient than your nic's processor and memory processing a packet... with nic... you are limited to its processing speed and memory buffer compare to your host's resources acting as a router... although you can apply moore's law on nic... unlike with outgoing packets where the host can temporarily put the packets on its big buffer while the nic is busy but for incoming packets where if the host is too slow fetching the packets from nic's buffer... the nic is starting to drop the incoming packets when its buffer is full... therefore it is much better to focus increasing the power of your host rather than on your nic... that is why others say that tcp offloading engine embedded in a nic is a dumb idea... fooler. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
