diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt | 26 |
1 files changed, 26 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt b/Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt index b247471a183c..d47480b61ac6 100644 --- a/Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt +++ b/Documentation/networking/segmentation-offloads.txt @@ -13,6 +13,7 @@ The following technologies are described: * Generic Segmentation Offload - GSO * Generic Receive Offload - GRO * Partial Generic Segmentation Offload - GSO_PARTIAL + * SCTP accelleration with GSO - GSO_BY_FRAGS TCP Segmentation Offload ======================== @@ -132,3 +133,28 @@ values for if the header was simply duplicated. The one exception to this is the outer IPv4 ID field. It is up to the device drivers to guarantee that the IPv4 ID field is incremented in the case that a given header does not have the DF bit set. + +SCTP accelleration with GSO +=========================== + +SCTP - despite the lack of hardware support - can still take advantage of +GSO to pass one large packet through the network stack, rather than +multiple small packets. + +This requires a different approach to other offloads, as SCTP packets +cannot be just segmented to (P)MTU. Rather, the chunks must be contained in +IP segments, padding respected. So unlike regular GSO, SCTP can't just +generate a big skb, set gso_size to the fragmentation point and deliver it +to IP layer. + +Instead, the SCTP protocol layer builds an skb with the segments correctly +padded and stored as chained skbs, and skb_segment() splits based on those. +To signal this, gso_size is set to the special value GSO_BY_FRAGS. + +Therefore, any code in the core networking stack must be aware of the +possibility that gso_size will be GSO_BY_FRAGS and handle that case +appropriately. (For size checks, the skb_gso_validate_*_len family of +helpers do this automatically.) + +This also affects drivers with the NETIF_F_FRAGLIST & NETIF_F_GSO_SCTP bits +set. Note also that NETIF_F_GSO_SCTP is included in NETIF_F_GSO_SOFTWARE. |