[e2e] Are you interested in TOEs and related issues (Resend)

[Sunay Tripathi]

Hi,

AT the end of the TSVWG session on Monday, I was trying to see if people
are interested in discussing TOE (TCP offload Engines) from the
prespective of new technology and issues arising out of it. I am
not sure if there are any protocol level issues yet that need to be
discussed under the scope of IETF (tcpm) charter. I just want to
scope out the interest in this area from implementation and integration
in the host OS point of view.

After the meeting, I already met 5-6 people who are interested in
talking about it so we will try and get together sometime wed/thur
after the plenary. If there are more people interested, Ted can
get us a room or figure out a more structured discussion either this
or next IETF meeting.

Please drop me a note with you time preference if you are interested 
and I'll see what we can rig up. A brief background and possible list 
of things to discuss is listed below.

TOE BAckground
--------------

In last couple of years, the number of vendors selling TOE based hardware
has increased significantly and we at SUN have personally talked to 
about 2 dozen such vendors. The claim is that TOE will be necessary for
10Gb NICs and for emerging technologies like iSCSI, RDMA, etc. These
vendors already have first generation h/w available for Windows and Linux
while some of them have moved on to 2nd generation. On Linux, these 
vendors support TOE by overwriting the S/W stack with their own hooks.
With pretty impressive performance and reduction in CPU utilization claims,
even the end users have started asking (atleast SUN) about TOE support.

Some things to discuss
----------------------

1) Are you working with TOEs in any way?
2) Have you faced any issues with TOE. Someof them are:
        - failover. When TOE runs out of resources or doesn't understand
          some options/features.
        - Old (and possibly buggy implementations) burned in ASIC which
          will be hard to upgrade as new modifications are made to TCP
          (even if they are 2-3 every year).
        - End to End correctness issues like TOE acking a packet but dying
          before the data is transfered to host memory. Or accepting the
          data to be sent out but dying before the packet hits the wire.
3) Any other issues?

Cheers,
Sunay

-- 
Sunay Tripathi
Senior Staff Engineer,
Solaris Kernel Networking,
Sun MicroSystems Inc.

email: sunay at eng.sun.com                 Phone: 650-786-6007 (W)