LSO and HW TX Checksum Link Properties [PSARC/2009/345 FastTrack timeout 06/15/2009]

[James Carlson]

Vasumathi Sundaram writes:
> To cite Andrew Gallatin from the thread,
> "...in general, I agree there should be some way to change what
> stateless offloads are in use at runtime. Solaris is way behind
> here. For example, the BSDs do it via ifconfig (to disable
> TSO on "mxge0": ifconfig mxge0 -tso), Linux does it via the
> horribly cryptic ethtool (to disable TSO on eth2:
> ethtool -K eth2 tso off)."

People may want to do it, but isn't it merely a hack?

If TSO/LSO/mumbleSO is working right, then why would a user ever need
to care?  Isn't this sort of like tweaking memory allocation
algorithms or PCI register values from the command line?

If it's just a hack, why not expose it at a lower stability level?

-- 
James Carlson, Solaris Networking              <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive        71.232W   Vox +1 781 442 2084
MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757   42.496N   Fax +1 781 442 1677