> > The MAC is still very much centralized in most designs. > > So one way they'll do it is to support assigning N MAC addresses, > > and you configure the input filters of the chip to push packets > > for each MAC to the proper receive queue. > > So the MAC will accept any of those in the N MAC addresses as > > it's own, then you use the filtering facilities to steer > > frames to the correct RX queue. > > Not quite... You'll have to deal with multiple Rx filters, not just > the current one-filter-for-all model present in today's NICs. Pools > of queues will have separate configured characteristics. The "steer" > portion you mention is a bottleneck that wants to be eliminated.
I think you're misunderstanding. These NICs still have only one physical port, so sending or receiving real packets onto a physical wire is fundamentally serialized. The steering of packets to receive queues is done right after the packets are received from the wire -- in fact it can be done as soon as the NIC has parsed enough of the headers to make a decision, which might be before the full packet has even been received. The steering is no more of a bottleneck than the physical link is. - R. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
