how to I enable packet steering in HP-UX

[kasturi_1]

I have following questions on packet steering:

1. Who configures packet steering? Which command?
2. Does the HP-UX stack provide the hash Key?
3. Who provides List of CPUs used for Packet Steering to interface driver?
4. What happens to Packet Steering in the context of interrupt migration?
5. How to configure hashing type?
6. Does HP-UX stack provide toeplitz hash key or someother appropriate hash key for IPV4 and IPV6?
7. How can HBA (interface) driver advertise to iLAN/DLPI it it supports packet steering and supported packet steering methods (IPV4, IPV4(TCP), IPV6, IPV6(TCP))
8. Is there a way for interface driver to know if the stack gives hash key or the driver/hardware to get their own (depending on their capbilities)
9. Can HP-UX protocal stack to rebalancing of CPUs depending on the load? if so, what is the interface to interface drivers?

[rick jones]

Packet steering - you mean RSS?

Back in HP-UX 10.20 HP-UX used something like RSS, called IPS - Inbound Packet Scheduling. A hash of the headers was done at the handoff point from the driver to netisr - this was not card-based. In HP-UX 11.0 and later, that was replaced by TOPS - Thread Optimized Packet Scheduling - instead of merely hashing, the socket was looked-up to find where the application last accessed the socket and processing takes-place there. This is still intra-stack and does not include the NIC.

IIRC the NICs for HP Integrity systems which do in-NIC hashing (not sure if it is toeplitz) are the AD385A and AD386A, which are PCI-X 2.0 266 MHz and PCIe Gen1 x8 cards respectively. If you are using a "plain old" GbE NIC, there's nothing there to enable.

Some of your questions make it sound like you are a driver writer - is that the case?

[kasturi_1]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the response.

You are right, I am into driver writing.

Kiran Kumar

[rick jones]

You should look into the DSPP - Developer Solutions Partner Program or whatever it is called today. You can try starting at http://www.hp.com/go/dspp