On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Rick Jones <rick.jones2@hp.com> wrote:

> > For a short time, servers with gigabit NICs suffered but smarter NICs
> > were developed (TSO, LRO, other TLAs) and OSs upgraded to support them
> > and I believe it is no longer a significant issue.
>
> Are TSO and LRO going to be sufficient at 40 and 100 GbE?  Cores aren't
> getting any faster. Only more plentiful.


  NICs seem to be responding by hashing incoming 5-tuples to distribute
flows across cores.


> And while it isn't the
> strongest point in the world, one might even argue that the need to use
> TSO/LRO to achieve performance hinders new transport protocol adoption -
> the presence of NIC offloads for only TCP (or UDP) leaves a new
> transport protocol (perhaps SCTP) at a disadvantage.


  True, and even UDP seems to be often blocked for anything other than DNS.