netdev
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Turning off CRC check in NIC

To: Donald Becker <becker@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Turning off CRC check in NIC
From: Ben Greear <greearb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 00:29:34 -0700
Cc: Carl-Johan Bostorp <ctor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, netdev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Organization: Candela Technologies
References: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10111101829280.686-100000@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sender: owner-netdev@xxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2


Donald Becker wrote:

On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Carl-Johan Bostorp wrote:


I want to turn off the CRC check on ethernet frames and pass every
packet up to the kernel.


Why?


I have an eepro100, so I mailed Intel about
it and asked for specs. The reply I got was that the kernel may
actually rely on the NIC doing this check.
So, what's the deal? What effects will there be if the NIC starts
passing everything up to the kernel?

The network stack will interpret arbitrarily corrupted packets as valid
data.  Very Bad Things might happen, and you'll not know what occurred or
why.


I doubt that anything would crash because the protocols should already
be hardened against any kind of malicious packet that might come along.
Could you mess up a NIC/Driver with a corrupt packet??


The higher layers like TCP and UDP have their own checksums, so should catch
most bad packets there...  (UDP may ignore it's checksum, btw)...

Ben





Donald Becker                           becker@xxxxxxxxx
Scyld Computing Corporation             http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210               Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403                      410-990-9993




--
Ben Greear <greearb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>