[Bloat] Random idea in reaction to all the discussion of TCPflavours - timestamps?

[Richard Scheffenegger]

----- Original Message ----- 
> It would be good to know what 10Gbps hw was capable of pushing more
> smarts (such as nRED) further down into the hardware itself, this may
> inform future software abstractions and future hardware designs.
>

IEEE 802.1Qau is becoming available with CNA (converged network adapter), 
10G NIC that also have FCoE hardware on-board.

This throttles individual flows - provided the entire end-to-end network 
also supports 802.1Qau (Quantizied Congestion Notification), as a decent 
enough flow granularity.

Deploying this in core networks will require a forklift upgrade, as current 
widely deployed 10G switches don't support QCN.

On another page, cheap, widely deployed Broadcom L3 ASICs (found in the 
low-end hardware of major network vendors) support RED in hardware - 
however, OEM firmware typically doesn't allow the configuration of the full 
feature set. (DCTCP as a TCP-based QCN-like was demonstrated with custom 
broadcom firmware doing the ECN marking based, soley based on current queue 
depth).

Regards,
   Richard