Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Dropping NETIF_F_SG since no checksum feature. | From | Roland Dreier <> | Date | Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:42:20 -0700 |
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David> Also, if you don't do checksumming on the card we MUST copy David> the data (be it from a user buffer, or from a filesystem David> page cache page) into a private buffer since if the data David> changes the checksum would become invalid, as I mentioned David> in another email earlier.
Yes, I get that now -- I replied to Michael's email before I read yours.
David> Therefore, since we have to copy anyways, it always is David> better to checksum in parallel with the copy.
Yes.
David> So the whole idea of SG without hw-checksum support is David> without much merit at all.
Well, on IB it is possible to implement a netdevice (IPoIB connected mode, I assume that's what Michael is working on) with a large MTU (64KB is a number thrown around, but really there's not any limit) but no HW checksum capability. Doing that in a practical way means we need to allow non-linear skbs to be passed in.
On the other hand I'm not sure how useful such a netdevice would be -- will non-sendfile() paths generate big packets even if the MTU is 64KB?
Maybe GSO gives us all the real advantages of this anyway?
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