TOE & RDMA support for NetXen hardware

[Sanjeev Jorapur]

I am re-posting this, since my first post didn't seem to get
through.

Hello,



Thanks to Sam for pointing us to the discussions on TOE support.

I do realize that we are jumping in late to this discussion, but

here is the current state of our hardware / software.



While we at NetXen currently don't have a FreeBSD driver, we do have a

shipping TOE product under Linux & Windows. Our TOE hardware

supports the following key features:



-  Full or partial offload. Full offload is used by Linux (and

   FreeBSD when we have a driver), while partial is used by Windows.



-  Ability to configure which connections are offloaded. Rather than

   offloading all connections by default, the connections are offloaded

   based on administrative action. The system admin can decide whether

   to offload based on TCP port, TCP tuple, IP address, application

   name, etc.



-  libpcap / tcpdump capability.



I looked at the TOE API and the offload connect / listen and data paths

are similar to what we would support.



Our customers do like the ability to control which connections get

offloaded, so offloading all by default is not desirable.



I could not make out how libpcap / tcpdump would be supported in the

TOE API.



Regarding the hardware filters, how are those hooked to the kernel

infrastructure ? Is that expected to be a separate user program

to control the hardware filter ?

We also have RDMA support in the hardware and will be interested in
a RDMA driver.


Sanjeev.