Re: I-D ACTION:draft-cavanna-iscsi-crc-vs-cksum-00.txt

[Michael Krause <krause@cup.hp.com>]

At 08:42 AM 3/2/2001 -0500, John H Howard wrote:

>CRC-32 is very expensive in software; it may require hardware assist in
>fast networks.  Is iSCSI really intended to be a hardware only protocol?

If one is attached to a high-speed network (Gbps and above), then hardware 
acceleration is a requirement to meet the customer performance 
objectives.  If a customer wants to attach to lower-speed networks, the 
impacts of using a CRC instead of a checksum are relatively in the "noise" 
range w.r.t. system resource utilization and overall performance.  As such, 
many of us favor using CRC-32 implementations - please see the e-mail 
proposal I sent out a month ago on how even a CRC-32 could be implemented 
to accelerate a software implementations while not penalizing hardware 
implementations.


Mike