Hello Agnieszka,
I'm planning to write RTL8169 driver as a GSoC project and have some
questions regarding usage of some 'advanced' features of NICs in HelenOS.
1) What about checksum offloading? Can I make use of this feature in NIC
driver to appropriately set offloading flags in TX descriptors?
Theoretically speaking this should be possible and there should be even
some rudimentary support for that in our DDF NIC framework (see the IPC
methods NIC_OFFLOAD_PROBE and NIC_OFFLOAD_SET).
Having said that, no existing NIC driver is using such capability (even
on devices that should support the feature), thus it is untested.
2) RTL8169 have two separate TX queues (with separate descriptor rings).
One is 'normal' queue and second is 'high priority' queue. Does it make
sense for now to make use of both and prioritize the packets? Maybe some
priority information may be guessed, i.e. putting ARP or ICMP packets in
'high priority' queue?
Yes, this does make sense. But the network stack has currently no notion
of priorities or QoS, thus both the API and the implementation need to
be extended to support this, without hard-wiring it too much.
Anyway, both ideas are definitively worth investigating, but for your
GSoC proposal I would keep them as optional items, if the time permits
you to engage them.
M.D.
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