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Date:      Thu, 27 Sep 2001 12:24:10 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Andrew Gallatin <gallatin@cs.duke.edu>
To:        Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>
Cc:        "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: TCP&IP cksum offload on FreeBSD 4.2 
Message-ID:  <15283.21162.173735.343154@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0109271009300.27057-100000@snaresland.acl.lanl.gov>
References:  <15283.19536.410864.339942@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> <Pine.LNX.4.33.0109271009300.27057-100000@snaresland.acl.lanl.gov>

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Ronald G Minnich writes:
 > On Thu, 27 Sep 2001, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
 > 
 > > At this level, you're basically screwed.  A sofware checksum isn't
 > > even an option on other PCI users, like disk controllers.  If you
 > > don't trust your PCI chipset, what do you do about things like that?
 > >
 > > I'm rather curious -- what was the problematic hardware combination?
 > 
 > Can't say yet :-(
 > 
 > But it is one of the fancy network interfaces that essentially runs an
 > RTOS on the NIC so it can "help you". Actually fancy $5000 network
 > interfaces are in general less reliable than your average garden-variety
 > $2 IDE chip. Partly because they have so much capability.
 > 
 > So we don't worry a lot about lossage with IDE. But it's a big problem on
 > expensive, high end, high performance network interfaces.

But SCSI isn't immune either.  We had some data corruption problems
with early adaptec Ultra-2 scsi controllers too, before Justin fixed
it by working around it in the driver.

Basically, anything that uses a PCI chipset harder or in different
ways than its designers expected can end up being a problem.  Low
volume hardware is somtimes worse, but not always...

Drew

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