On May 24, 2007, at 12:10 PM, Andrew Falanga wrote:
I'm curious as to how FreeBSD handles checksum offloading for TCP
packets.  Is this on by default?

If a particular NIC supports checksum offloading, it is typically enabled by default.

It seems that it's only relevant for specific drivers rather than something that's just assumed.

That's correct. Most of the gigabit NICs support it, but few of the older NICs do.

How can I determine if this is supported for the hardware I'm running? Is it
common for tcp checksum offloading to be in the fxp driver?  Can one
turn it off (though, it honestly sounds like no one would wish to do
so)?

You can use ifconfig to see whether the RXCSUM & TXCSUM options are listed, and you can use ifconfig to enable or disable it:

     rxcsum, txcsum
If the driver supports user-configurable checksum offloading, enable receive (or transmit) checksum offloading on the inter- face. Some drivers may not be able to enable these flags inde- pendently of each other, so setting one may also set the other. The driver will offload as much checksum work as it can reliably support, the exact level of offloading varies between drivers.

     -rxcsum, -txcsum
If the driver supports user-configurable checksum offloading, disable receive (or transmit) checksum offloading on the inter- face. These settings may not always be independent of each
             other.

I don't believe that the fxp NICs support checksum offloading.

--
-Chuck

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

Reply via email to