/dev/dump

FYI, I've submitted earlier today the RTI for mxfe. I expect afe (which will be more popular) will be later this week or early next. (We've fallen behind on some of the testing.) I've also started looking at porting rtls to SPARC, and making it support SUSPEND/RESUME. More on that shortly.

And now rtls is GLDv3. Not open source (yet), and no SPARC support, but hopefully those will both get fixed soon. Have fun!

As my first gift to the community since becoming a Sun employee, I've putback the conversion of QFE to the new hme common GLDv3 code. Now you can use your old QFE boards with IP instances, VLANs, whatever. Go wild. Hopefully the rtls conversion will get putback tonight as well... still waiting for my RTI advocate to approve it.

I've recently hacked up the Realtek driver (rtls) to support GLDv3. Its part of usr/closed right now (though I hope we can open source it!), so I can only share binaries. Anyway, if you're stuck with this driver on your x86 system (because its on your motherboard, usually), and you want to try running a GLDv3 version of the driver, let me know. The GLDv3 brings link aggregation support, VLAN support, and virtualization (IP instances) with it. Of course the hardware is still somewhat crummy, so I wouldn't expect to get much performance out of it. But again, if you're stuck with it (as many people probably are) this may be helpful.

For those not in the know, its now official. I'll be (re-)joining Sun as a regular full time employee starting August 20th. That means that I get to drop the "C" in front of my employee ID. I'll be reporting to Neal Pollack, initially working on various Intel related Solaris projects.

(This blog is as much for the benefit for other FOSS developers as it is for OpenSolaris.) Please have a look at 6587116, which points out a hardware limitation in the hme chipset. I've found that at least NetBSD, and probably also Linux, suffer in that they expect the chip to support hardware checksum offload. However, if the packet is less than 64-bytes (not including FCS), the hardware IP checksum engine will fail. This means all packets that get padded, and even some that are otherwise legal (not needing padding) will not be checksummed properly. For these packets, software checksum must be used.

As a result of investigation of a fix for 6587116 (a bug in HME, more later), we have found a gaping bug in the implementation of UDP checksums on Solaris. Most particularly, it appears that UDP hardware checksum offload is broken for the cases where the checksum calculation will result in a 16-bit value of 0. Most protocols (TCP, ICMP, etc.) specify that the value 0 be used for the checksum in this case. UDP, however, specifies that the value 0xffff be substituted for 0. Why ? Because 0 is given special meaning. In IPv4 networks, it means that transmitter did not bother to include a checksum. In IPv6, the checksum is mandatory, and RFC 2460 says that when the receiver sees a packet with a zero checksum it should be discarded. The problem is, the hardware commonly in use on Sun SPARC systems (hme, eri, ge, and probably also ce and nxge) does not have support for this particular semantic. Furthermore, we have no way to know, in the current spec, if this semantic should be applied ...