CentOS - Oct 2009 - Broadcom chips: TOE or no TOE?

Last time I checked (but that was a while ago) TOE (TCP Offloading 
Engine) was not supported very well, at least not with Broadcom chips. 
Did anything change in that regard recently?

More specifically, the chip I'm looking at is Broadcom NetXtreme II 5709 
and the distribution is 5.3

Any luck with proprietary drivers? Any problems those drivers may cause 
with bonding?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Florin Andrei wrote:
> Any luck with proprietary drivers? Any problems those drivers may cause
> with bonding?
I don't think there are proprietary drivers for broadcom NICs,
about 5 years ago there was proprietary fault tolerance drivers
but I don't see them now.

If you go to their site they just give you the generic open source
drivers.

I've looked on occasion for the TOE stuff but as you found support
isn't there yet. I think I read of significant complications with
offloading the stack in linux with regards to things like iptables
and stuff.

I think there is some support for the iSCSI offload onto some of
their NICs depending on driver, but not aware of anything for
the full TCP stack.

nate