Glen Turner wrote:

On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 20:34 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:

quoted

The philosophical problem I have with this suggestion is that I expect
that the large majority of users will be more happy with disabled TSO
if they use non standard qdiscs and defaults that do not fit 
the majority use case are bad.

I wouldn't be so fast to assume that all users need an exact playout
rate, as people seem to do fine with the 8Kbps playout steps in Cisco
IOS.  A nerd-knob which expresses user's preference in the
accuracy/performance trade-off would be nice.

The problem with ethtool is that it's a non-obvious nerd knob.  At
the least the ethtool documentation should be updated to indicate that 
activating TSO effects tc accuracy.

I agree with Andi, most user neither know nor care about TSO.
It should work properly by default and optimizations should
be explicitly configured. This is especially true if you
consider the common userbase of qdiscs - which is mostly
slow DSL lines, cablemodems etc.