From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 24 May 2001 18:16:45 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 24 May 2001 18:16:35 -0400 Received: from user-vc8ftn3.biz.mindspring.com ([216.135.246.227]:41742 "EHLO mail.ivivity.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 24 May 2001 18:16:26 -0400 Message-ID: <25369470B6F0D41194820002B328BDD207179D@ATLOPS> From: Bharath Madhavan To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Accelerated TCP/IP support from kernel Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 18:16:17 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello all, I am looking into a scenario where we have a NIC which performs all the TCP/IP processing and basically the core CPU offloads all data from the socket level interface onwards to this NIC. Can Linux do this as of now. I saw some limited support like TCP/IP checksumming being done in HW (ex: 3c905c) and linux supports it. I also saw the ZERO_COPY feature in linux code. My question is can there be support for entire (almost) TCP/IP to be offloaded to a NIC card. I noticed some NIC cards by Alacritec and Applicom who have such NICs but it looks like the support from Linux would be quite a bit of work. Basically Linux needs to support all socket calls as it will usually but the socket interface must be intelligent enough to call different drivers(!) for those NIC cards and thus bypassing the whole of TCP/IP stack of Linux. Is this possible at all and if so, is anyone doing this??? I talked to a vendor who does this NIC and he said that they provide a library for linux which means that they have proprietery functions for using their NIC and thus this cannot be used in the standard socket interface way. That is a big limitation and not of much use. Basically, I am looking into a case where the kernel code needs to be changed to handle this Looking eagerly for some help/advice from you folks Thanks a lot Bharath