Subject: Re: More on IP over 1394

From: Bill Nowicki <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 12:19:09 -0800

Normally I would not respond to such fame bait, but since I
have known Erik for many years, would like to appologize for
the usualy mis-spelling of his name. Please forgive what too
many years in the American school system does to one's spelling.

> (by the way, do those asterisks indicate swear words?)

No, emphasis.

> So how can the claimed problems be fixed by fixing the hosts,
> when the **PROTOCOLS** don't use those better facilities?

We disagree on the "better". I do not think that a more
complicated scheme (using a lock, writes to a memory block,
ack and unlock) is necessarily "better" compared to the existing
FIFO approach. For very large transfers between a disk and host
(such as the example given, SBP-2) the memory write approach can
indeed be faster.

I was just pointing out that for Ethernet, one popular networking
technology, the protocol was kept simple, but host interfaces
were improved as I stated. Copies were avoided, checksums calculated
in the interfaces, interrupts colalesced, etc. My point was that
none of these issues required work in standards committees, since
the protocols were not changed. What they required was work by the
people doing the interface chips, device drivers, and protocol
stacks. These issues are important, but not part of the IETF charter.