Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
RE: tcp/ip hardware offload
From: Richard Masoner <richardm () masoner net>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 23:16:37 -0600
Liran Cohen wrote:
Upgrading can be done today on most of the hardware products , almost every product in the field (networking) has a flash RAM which can be changed (shiva devices , routers etc...) , regarding errors in hard-coded software , there are already several patches and updates for many devices .
Are you talking about actual gate arrays? or firmware which is run by a processor core? I'm aware of how firwmare works, which is generally copied from a FLASH device to faster memory for actual execution by a CPU. And I understand the PLDs and FPGAs are theoretically reprogrammable, but they're too expensive, aren't they? You're not going to build an FPGA-based network adapter for under about US$ 5000, from what I understand (the iReady part is about $5.)
I've re-read the Intel datasheet, and it appears the TCP/IP offload is in firmware rather than hardware. The Adaptec part, however, seems to be gate arrays; I haven't heard from anybody at Adaptec to prove or disprove this. I did get a response from somebody familiar with iReady, and he told me that early spins of the chip had some bugs which you basically had to just live with.
I'm a software person rather than a hardware person, so feel free to educate me on this :-)
Richard Masoner
Current thread:
- RE: tcp/ip hardware offload Liran Cohen (Mar 04)
- RE: tcp/ip hardware offload Richard Masoner (Mar 04)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: tcp/ip hardware offload Jonathan M. Smith (Mar 04)
- Re: tcp/ip hardware offload Ron DuFresne (Mar 04)
- RE: tcp/ip hardware offload PIATT, BRET L (PB) (Mar 05)