intel checksum offload

[Adrian Chadd]

Arnaud (and others),

Liaising with vendors is not an easy task. The reason why Intel (and
other vendors) don't supply detailed history and reasoning for their
development efforts is that their engineers are likely tasked with
"making it work" versus "writing lots of stuff down for public
release." In some instances, the vendor support of FreeBSD (and "free"
open source in general) is done as a side-project by some of the
engineers inside the company.

So in this case, you may find that Jack and the other engineers at
Intel just don't have the time or resources to dedicate the kinds of
feedback and support you seem to be after. He and others likely have a
huge set of tasks to do at work and none of them officially include
"support FreeBSD/Linux developers by providing detailed feedback and
assistance." So whenever Jack pops up to help out, he's likely doing
it in his spare time. :-)

Developers can and will disable or remove functionality which is
problematic because they don't have the time or resources to support
it. Users may wish to turn on unsupported features and then will
complain loudly when they don't work; even giving up and moving to
another piece of equipment because of perceived issues. I agree that
it would be nice if the developers included _all_ features,
unsupported or not, so that developers can choose to work on them if
they wish. It however is a trade-off between trying to provide
developers with more useful things to tinker with and not increasing
support load from users (and other developers) who seek to use
incomplete features.

I hope this helps.


Adrian