TCP Off Load Engine (TOE) question

[chuckk281]

Marc had some NIC/Adapter questions regarding CPU Off Loading capabilities:

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I’m looking for a NIC adapter with  ToE support (TCP Of Load Engine)

Future NC366i is based on Intel i350 ( http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/I350_Family_Product_Brief_v001.pdf ), it supports “LAN accelerations include TCP stateless offloads such as TCP/IP checksum, TCP segmentation, Receive Side Coalescing (RSC), and Receive Side Scaling (RSS) “

Is it the same features than ToE ?

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Armand replied:

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It sounds very similar to actual TCP off-load engine we implement on most of our NIC’s option and for a while.

RSS is supported my Microsoft OS for many years.

RSC seems to be a more recent technology proposed by Intel.

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Also from Vincent:

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Strictly speaking, TCP Offload Engine refers to running the entire TCP/IP stack on the NIC instead of the host’s CPU. The various offloads you mention are a subset of TCP processing. In particular, “stateless” offloads refer to parts of the protocol that can be processed without maintaining a table of connections with their current state. So I wouldn’t say that TCP stateless offloads is equivalent to TCP Offload Engine, but, depending on context, it might be good enough.

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Other comments or input?