Re: sendfile+zerocopy: fairly sexy (nothing to do with ECN)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Jan 28, 2001 at 02:37:48PM +0100, Felix von Leitner wrote:
> Thus spake Andrew Morton ([e-mail]):
> > Conclusions:
> 
> >   For a NIC which cannot do scatter/gather/checksums, the zerocopy
> >   patch makes no change in throughput in all case.
> 
> >   For a NIC which can do scatter/gather/checksums, sendfile()
> >   efficiency is improved by 40% and send() efficiency is decreased by
> >   10%.  The increase and decrease caused by the zerocopy patch will in
> >   fact be significantly larger than these two figures, because the
> >   measurements here include a constant base load caused by the device
> >   driver.
> 
> What is missing here is a good authoritative web ressource that tells
> people which NIC to buy.
> 
> I have a tulip NIC because a few years ago that apparently was the NIC
> of choice.  It has good multicast (which is important to me), but AFAIK
> it has neither scatter-gather nor hardware checksumming.
> 
> Is there such a web page already?
> If not, I volunteer to create amd maintain one.

Additionally, it would be useful to have some boot messages comment on the
abilities of cards. I am sick and tired of dealing with people telling me
that 'Linux performance sucks' when they keep putting Linux on systems with
pci 8139 adaptors.