hme checksum limitations

(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.

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