Re: More performance for the TCP stack by using additional hardware chip on NIC

[Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl>]

Andreas Hartmann <andihartmann@01019freenet.de> said:
> Alacritech developed a new chip for NIC's
> (http://www.alacritech.com/html/tech_review.html), which makes it possible
> to take away the TCP stack from the host CPU. Therefore, the host CPU has
> more performance for the applications according Alacritech.
> 
> This sounds interesting.

This idea has been discussed around here a couple of times, and the
consensus is that it is a bad idea: IP (and upper protocol) processing
is not expensive, if done right, so this really doesn't buy much; this
forces a particular interface to networking into the kernel, loosing
flexibility that way is always bad; there is no access to futzing
around in between (for example, for firewalling and such); and if the
"hardware implementation" has bugs, you are screwed.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                     Fono: +56 32 654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria              +56 32 654239
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