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RE: [Xen-users] Slow windows network with gplpv driver.

> > 
> 
> The point of the offloading in DomU is that no checksum generation is
> necessary, so the checksums will always be invalid while the packets
> exist on the bridge. If the packet is sent to another DomU that supports
> checksum offload then Dom0 will leave the checksum invalid and pass a
> flag with the packet to say that the packet is checked and so looking at
> the checksum is unnecessary. If the packet is sent to a DomU that
> doesn't support offload then Dom0 will just calculate the checksum. If
> the packet hits a physical network adapter then the hardware will
> calculate the checksum or if the hardware doesn't support it then Dom0
> will calculate it.

Right, understood, but I tend to see bad checksums on packets when they
reach the destination (or are on the wire, via a Network TAP), and not
just on the local bridge.

> 
> That's the way it's supposed to work. I have seen problem where:
> 
> . The packet is routed onto a GRE tunnel. This was a while back (~2.6.18
> I think) and erratic... it would work fine for a week then suddenly
> start spitting out bad packets onto the GRE tunnel. 
> 
> . The packet is bridged onto a VLAN on a physical network adapter. Some
> network adapters support checksum offload but only for the untagged vlan
> 1. Linux seems to not handle this correctly for some (all?) such
> adapters so the checksum is never calculated. Same for large send
> offload. Again, I only saw this on older kernels but in that case the
> offload has not been turned on again for newer kernels as the
> performance isn't required (routing out to WAN connections etc).

This definitely describes one of my scenarios - on my production systems
(SLES10 and SLES11) I frequently tag VLANs on a single physical
interface.  However, I also see the problem on some of my Desktop Xen
systems where I'm running Xen + openSuSE 11.3 + Windows XP VM, with a
single bridge that does not use VLANs.

I'll have to do some more checking and make sure I work through all of
the scenarios...

-Nick



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