On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 15:46, John Heffner wrote:
> > Currently with many common Ethernet devices in Linux, hardware TCP
> > checksumming is enabled by default. This seems fairly dangerous to me.
> > Most link layer checksums are much stronger than the TCP/UDP checksum;
> > most bit errors are caught by these. However, one of the primary purposes
> > of the TCP/UDP checksum is to detect errors occurring outside the
> > protection of the link layer checksums -- errors when data is reassembled
> > or copied across busses inside hosts and routers.
>
> If you're getting errors copying things on buses inside of the machine,
> don't you have bigger problems than corrupt packets? For instance, why
> doesn't your disk controller have the same problem?
>
> Just curious.
It's a probem with the NIC. It did the same thing in a different machine.
The point is that I think it's a good idea to mitigate the effects of
faulty hardware, especially if you can do so nearly for free.
-John
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