driver packet coalesce

[Jack Vogel]

On 5/30/07, Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> wrote:
> Andrew Thompson wrote:
> > On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 04:45:05PM -0700, Jack Vogel wrote:
> >> Does any driver do this now? And if a driver were to coalesce
> >> packets and send something up the stack that violates mss
> >> will it barf?
> >
> > It would barf for things like bridging where the packet gets spit out a
> > different interface. The bridge driver already has code to disable
> > txcsum so it could be made to handle that too.
> >
> >
> > Andrew
...
>
> This is part od TOE right?

No, its something thats being talked about in our new PCI-E 10G driver.

> I presume that it wouldn't coalesce packets that are not destined for the local
> machine?  would it coalesce in promiscuous mode?   I guess it would only be
> able to coalesce TCP packets that are adjacent in the same session.
> Whether it also can coalesce adjacent packets that are destined for another
> machine (for which it is not running the session) is not known... I would guess it
> wouldn't do it.

Right, at least that's the lines I was thinking about. At this point this is
brainstorming, and I wanted to know if there were any hard stops that
would keep it from being done.

Jack