Lucid Patch Review

[Phillip Lougher]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 5:49 PM, Andy Whitcroft <apw at canonical.com> wrote:

>    0038-UBUNTU-SAUCE-r8169-disable-TSO-by-default-for-RTL811.patch
>        Phillip Lougher <phillip at ubuntu.com>
>        This claims to be a temporary work around for a problem, added
>        in Jun 2007.  Is it still needed.
>

This is the original bug report

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/76489

As far as I can remember the patch is a temporary workaround because
it didn't actually fix the underlying problem.  The problem was the
driver/card dies under heavy transmit load.  Disabling TSO (tcp
segmentation offload) minimises the problem, but doesn't fix it.
There is/was obviously a bug in the transmit code, and disabling TSO
probably slows things down so it doesn't occur as frequently.

Is it still needed?  It obviously depends on whether the real bug has
been identified and fixed since 2007.  According to the bug report,
people were still complaining of issues in August this year.  It may
have been fixed in more recent kernels. but I've not looked.

Phillip