On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 12:19:36PM -0700, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> 
> True. OTOH, my experience is that, at least to a first approxmation,
> relying on outboard checksumming only makes sense if you don't care
> whether the data transferred is correct or not. There are just too
> many bugs in too many versions of NIC firmware/hardware/DMA engines,
> which sw checksumming catches but outboard checksumming doesn't.  My
> guess is this wont change much (if at all) until mass-market OSes
> (windows) start to really use IP/TCP/UDP assist.

Every 3Com NIC shipped in about the past three years has had checksum
offload, and the Win32 drivers use it, too.  Not to mention the onboard
gigabit interfaces on all of the x86 server boxes shipped by major vendors
these days -- I think your "until" has already happened.

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud