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The networking analogy would be things like DPDK, where yes, you do need to know what the hardware is doing, and yes, there's vendor-specific support. The answe
by regularfry 7y ago
The networking analogy would be things like DPDK, where yes, you do need to know what the hardware is doing, and yes, there's vendor-specific support. The answer to "how many people bother" would be "as many as have a damn good reason to do so." http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/overview.html http://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/overview.html shows the non-homogeneity of NIC feature support across vendors; if you don't care about this stuff, there's no reason to know it, but if you do, it's make or break.
- cnst 7y agoSure, that's a lot of variation. Sure, some of these features are essential for certain applications, like checksum offload etc. However, most of these features are still uniform enough that a whole bunch of them are supported by standard drivers included with all BSD operating systems, and configurable with the standard ifconfig of each BSD, too: http://mdoc.su/-/ifconfig.8 http://mdoc.su/-/ifconfig.8 The fact that you even have a whole table with these features shows that these features are not that difficult to categorise and unbrand to be general enough to have OS-defined behaviours and configurations for.