Van Jacobson's network channels & 10 Gb/s ethernet [LWN.net]

Van Jacobson's network channels & 10 Gb/s ethernet

Posted Jan 31, 2006 22:54 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624)
Parent article: Van Jacobson's network channels

Two final comments - honest!

1) His test results for 10Gb/s ethernet were limited not by drivers, kernel or networking but by the memory bandwidth of the DDR333 chips in the system he was testing on!

He estimated that you would need at least DDR800 RAM to be able to have enough memory bandwidth to drive 10Gb/s at capacity.

2) VJ said anyone who tells you that you'll need a TOE is not telling the truth. OK - this was known already but could be handy for beating vendors around the head with.. :-)

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Van Jacobson's network channels & 10 Gb/s ethernet

Posted Feb 1, 2006 2:17 UTC (Wed) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

What is a TOE?

TOE

Posted Feb 1, 2006 2:25 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

TOE = "TCP Offload Engine," the TCP protocol implemented in adapter firmware. See this Kernel Page article from last August for one Linux-based implementation and all the reasons why it didn't get merged.

Van Jacobson's network channels & 10 Gb/s ethernet

Posted Feb 2, 2006 5:35 UTC (Thu) by bos (subscriber, #6154) [Link]

Plenty of Linux networking gear can drive 10Gbps hardware at line rate, and I'm not even talking about fancy TOE hardware in all cases.

Not having been at the talk, I don't know what circumstances he was talking about (perhaps specifically TCP at 10Gbps?), so I'm not picking a nit with his assertion, just pointing out that something along those lines can be done without scads of memory bandwidth.

Van Jacobson's network channels & 10 Gb/s ethernet

Posted Feb 8, 2006 8:57 UTC (Wed) by csamuel (subscriber, #2624) [Link]

Yes, this is about TCP, not just pushing datagrams out..