> If you were hoping that TCP checksums would protect against (say) DMA > errors between the network device and the stack itself, that > protection is disabled by off-load. The trade-off you get is not > having to waste CPU time looking at every byte against the > unlikelihood of such (system design) errors.
So does this argue for having a supported mechanism for disabling checksum offload? I ask because we were recently talking about how to revise dladm to indicate whether capabilities like checksum offload are supported on a given link, and at the time it wasn't clear to me that having a facility for disabling capabilities was a good idea. My concern was that having a first-class mechanism for disabling them would be tantamount to saying that all possible combinations are supported -- but I'm not convinced that's feasible. Further, I believe for most capabilities (e.g., LSO or MDT), you'd only want to disable them as a workaround for a bug or as a debugging aid, for which /etc/system seems to have the appropriate level of "skank". -- meem _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
