Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 19 Oct 2001 13:07:12 -0700 | From | Mike Fedyk <> | Subject | Bad name/docs: "Forwarding between high speed interfaces" |
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This option enables NIC (Network Interface Card) hardware throttling during periods of extremal congestion. At the moment only a couple of device drivers support it (really only one -- tulip, a modified 8390 driver can be found at ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/fastroute/fastroute-8390.tar.gz ).
Really, this option is applicable to any machine attached to a fast enough network, and even a 10 Mb NIC is able to kill a not very slow box, such as a 120MHz Pentium.
However, do not say Y here if you did not experience any serious problems.
This doesn't look too incouraging. Until I read the whole 150+ message thread about IRQ throtling, I thought it had something to do with ethernet bridging at high load.
I'm not surprised that this option has been overlooked.
I think the Configure.help message should be something like:
This option enables NIC (Network Interface Card) hardware throttling during periods high load.
Without this option, a fast NIC, fast network, and a slow computer can get enough pp/s (packets per second) to provide an effective DoS attack. (This has been reported to be possible with a 10Mbps ethernet NIC on a Pentium 120Mhz)
At the moment only a few device drivers support it (At the moment, only tulip, and a modified 8390 - specifically NE2000/1000 - driver that can be found at ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/fastroute/fastroute-8390.tar.gz).
Hopefully more drivers will support this feature soon.
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I took a look at fastroute-8390.tar.gz, and it seems to be a driver written by Donald Becker from way back in '94. If so, it's probably 2.2 only, and should be taken out of the 2.4 documentation. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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