Re: More performance for the TCP stack by using additional hardware chip on NIC

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On Apr 17, 2005, at 19:37, Horst von Brand wrote:
Andreas Hartmann <[email protected]> said:
Alacritech developed a new chip for NIC's
(http://www.alacritech.com/html/tech_review.html), which makes it possible to take away the TCP stack from the host CPU. Therefore, the host CPU has
more performance for the applications according Alacritech.

This sounds interesting.

This idea has been discussed around here a couple of times, and the
consensus is that it is a bad idea: IP (and upper protocol) processing
is not expensive, if done right, so this really doesn't buy much; this
forces a particular interface to networking into the kernel, loosing
flexibility that way is always bad; there is no access to futzing
around in between (for example, for firewalling and such); and if the
"hardware implementation" has bugs, you are screwed.

What I think would be _much_ more useful is a generic low-power multi-proc MIPS/PPC system on a PCI card with a certain amount of RAM, etc that could
be programmed at runtime by the master CPU.  Then you lose none of the
flexibility, it can be run in the same endian-mode as the host CPU, and it would allow you to program it for much more complicated DMA. You could do
anything from linux software RAID, audio processing, encryption, TCP/IP
stack acceleration, extra scatter-gather for your disk controller, etc.
If it was low-cost, IE: cheaper than adding extra full-speed CPUs to the
system, and using a decent bi-endian, vector-capable CPU (Like PPC), you
might find that people will buy them for the flexibility.  Such a thing
might also be useful for the prezero folks, it could be used (when not
otherwise occupied) for zeroing unused pages.

Personally, I think I'd buy one or two just to tinker with them :-D.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett

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