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Date:      Fri, 27 Feb 1998 16:13:12 -0800 (PST)
From:      Vinay Bannai <bannai@best.com>
To:        archie@whistle.com (Archie Cobbs)
Cc:        mike@smith.net.au, sthaug@nethelp.no, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: "Best" Fast Ethernet Card
Message-ID:  <199802280013.QAA04406@shell6.ba.best.com>
In-Reply-To: <199802271811.KAA00364@bubba.whistle.com> from Archie Cobbs at "Feb 27, 98 10:11:46 am"

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According to Archie Cobbs:
> Mike Smith writes:
> > Sure.  However I think the point here is that you can only do hardware 
> > checksums efficiently if you collapse the protocol stack to the point 
> > where code has access to both the hardware and then TCP layer.  
> > 
> > That's expedient, and fast, but potentially *very* ugly.  It also 
> > raises the issue of fragment reassembly.
> 
> There's nothing wrong with taking stable, existing, working code
> and optimizing it for the common case.
> 
> For example, you could do it with an internal mbuf flag M_IPSUM that
> would indicate that the hardware has already verified the checksum
> on the packet.
> 
> Sure it's not pretty, but it's a lot cleaner than some other stuff
> I've seen in there.. (the kernel, that is :-)
> 
> -Archie

Yup. The ifnet device has a flag which indicates that it is capable of
doing checksum in the hardware and you set this flag in the mbufs and pass
it along. This is pretty usefule when computing checksumn in hardware for
transmits too.

I know of atleast two protocol stack implementations (popular too) that
use these techniques...

Vinay
-- 
Vinay Bannai                     E-mail: bannai@best.com



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