Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Posted Dec 8, 2015 20:12 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: Checksum offloads and protocol ossification

Keeping everything but generic number-crunching in the kernel is probably a very good idea, for much the same reasons as RAID.

I was experimenting with `ethtool -k` settings on my LAN the other day; the hardware doesn't have much of a feature set and it's all off-by-default, but on one end (a RTL8168e) enabling any of the interesting offloading features it claims to support... breaks everything. Nothing more fun than silent failures caused by buggy hardware!

Admittedly that experience is based on $0.10 desktop Realtek chips, but at the same time, paying 10-1000× more for any type of hardware doesn't have a linear correlation to quality.