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Date:      Fri, 21 Jan 2000 21:34:23 -0800 (PST)
From:      Jim Shankland <jas@flyingfox.com>
To:        brett@lariat.org, bright@wintelcom.net, dillon@apollo.backplane.com
Cc:        phk@critter.freebsd.dk, security@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: stream.c worst-case kernel paths
Message-ID:  <200001220534.VAA10095@biggusdiskus.flyingfox.com>
In-Reply-To: <4.2.2.20000121205951.01a58bb0@localhost>

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Brett Glass writes:

> At 08:46 PM 1/21/2000 , Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> 
> >Please look at tcp_input, notice the "goto drop" and "goto
> >dropwithreset" jumps, they are scattered throught and after some
> >pretty close examination (no tests yet) I've been able to see that
> >we can signifigantly move the tcp checksum farther into the path.
> 
> One of the first things the routine does is look for a socket that
> matches the TCP header. This relies on the port numbers and control 
> bits, which are covered by the checksum. This is the hard limit 
> on how long you can defer the checksum.

With all due respect, I think you guys are polishing a pretty round
ball here.  If checksumming is so all-fired expensive, how come I can
saturate a 100 Mb/s point-to-point Ethernet link with an ftp transfer
to a fairly slow machine (Pentium 133? not sure, it's been a few years
since I did this) without the machine buckling under the weight
of all that checksumming (plus socket buffering, user process
scheduling, etc.).  If a 10 Mb/s junk packet stream can really
bring a FreeBSD machine to its knees, I don't think it's the
checksumming that's the problem.

Jim Shankland
NLynx Systems, Inc.


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