Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 16 Sep 2004 19:29:43 +1000 | From | Lincoln Dale <> | Subject | Re: The ultimate TOE design |
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not that i disagree with the general idea and rationale, but reality is what it is today for some reasons:
At 07:23 AM 16/09/2004, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Jeff, who would love to have a bunch of Athlons > on PCI cards to play with.
. . . this ignore the realities of power restrictions of PCI today . . . sure, one could create a PCI card that takes a power-connector, but that don't scale so well either . . .
At 07:29 AM 16/09/2004, David S. Miller wrote: >I think a better goal is "offload 90+% of the net stack cost" which >is effectively what TSO does on the send side. > >This is why these discussions are so circular.
TSO works on LAN-like environments (zero latency, minimal drop), it doesn't work so well across the internet . . .
i believe that there are better alternatives than TSO, but it involves NICs having decent scatter-gather DMA engines and being able to be handled multiple transactions (packets/frames) at once. in theory, NICs like tg2/tg3 should be capable of implementing something like this -- if one could get to the ucode on the embedded cores.
at least with PCI Express the general architecture of a PC starts to have a hope of keeping up with Moore's law. the same couldn't be said prior to DDR-SDRAM and higher front-side-bus frequencies.
cheers,
lincoln.
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