Yes, reception is hairy. But (at least I) am talking about sending - I see
more scenarios where a single computer sends data to many others, than a
single computer receives a lot of data (and needs to do it extremely
efficiently).
Sending is technically much easier to make zero-copy. As others have
pointed out there are issues regarding threading and TCP socket semantics
(like write()/sendmsg() returning before the last fragment is ACK'ed ?)
which relate to the handling of the locked pages. But the actual NIC
sending is easy to do - at least our NIC HW can receive DMA lists telling
it to send an IP header from position X, then a payload from position Y,
etc etc.
Speaking of checksumming outgoing fragments in HW - it is trivial to make
the HW calculate the checksum itself, but I see a problem with having it
inserting it in the stream - mainly because the checksum field passes
through the HW _before_ the data it is supposed to checksum. How is this
solved in the HW that can do outgoing checksumming ? Does it have a FIFO
large enough to keep an MTU (and manipulate the header) ?
/Bjorn
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