Messages in this thread | | | From | (Alan Cox) | Subject | Re: FYI: I2O Architecture (fwd) | Date | Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:30:58 +0000 (GMT) |
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> Despite the pros-and-cons, most of the OS vendors seem to be behind this > (Microsoft, Novell, SCO, Digitial...), and the 'standard' is > currently closed to outsiders.
Makes sense. Otherwise outsiders go and run stuff faster than them. Also be aware big vendors buy into anything cheap and potential useful
> With the processing power that will be on some of the I2O cards, we > might find network protocol stacks (TCP?), etc, being off-loaded from the > central CPUs. > Would this be a step backwards or forwards from SMP?
It depends is the answer. It can be a step backwards from single processors even. Its costlier it adds latency and it may actually slow things down. Contrary to some perceptions things like networking and disk I/O are not CPU intensive per se. What costs is stuff like VM strategy - which is hard to hive off, and in the networking case its just the fact you get hit at 100Mbits/second.
Now you can either hand the network packets to someone else or handle them locally. If you handle them locally then you've got to handle them. Your network card can do checksums (eg sun hme cards), but the data still has to go to user space and through your web server. If its going somewhere else you don't need I2O, you need an existing device popularly called a "router".
Alan
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