not that i disagree with the general idea and rationale, but reality is 
what it is today for some reasons:

At 07:23 AM 16/09/2004, Jeff Garzik wrote:

        Jeff, who would love to have a bunch of Athlons
        on PCI cards to play with.

. . . this ignore the realities of power restrictions of PCI today . . .
sure, one could create a PCI card that takes a power-connector, but that 
don't scale so well either . . .

At 07:29 AM 16/09/2004, David S. Miller wrote:

I think a better goal is "offload 90+% of the net stack cost" which
is effectively what TSO does on the send side.

This is why these discussions are so circular.

TSO works on LAN-like environments (zero latency, minimal drop), it doesn't 
work so well across the internet . . .

i believe that there are better alternatives than TSO, but it involves NICs 
having decent scatter-gather DMA engines and being able to be handled 
multiple transactions (packets/frames) at once.
in theory, NICs like tg2/tg3 should be capable of implementing something 
like this -- if one could get to the ucode on the embedded cores.


at least with PCI Express the general architecture of a PC starts to have a 
hope of keeping up with Moore's law.
the same couldn't be said prior to DDR-SDRAM and higher front-side-bus 
frequencies.


cheers,

lincoln.