This is an old revision of the document!
===== Week 7 [ Mon 5 Jul 2010 - Sun 11 Jul 2010 ] ===== ==== Day 1 [ Mon 5 Jul 2010 ] ==== Started working on the .transmit routine. As a minor off-topic, I just want to say that even though this driver hasn't been so much fun to develop ( because it involved a lot more copy and paste than the old one ), it definitely compensated through a large number of theoretical concepts ( see my previous entries for more details ). The first thing I ran into today was [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_segment_offload |Large segment offloading]]. LSO works by delegating the responsibility of packet fragmentation to the NIC, thus relieving the CPU of the task of splitting packets to the appropriate size. This saves CPU cycles and increases performance. I made the connection with a [[http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1298483|paper]] I've read earlier this year, also related to offloading. Anyway, since gPXE does not does not support LSO, the related code will be ignored but it was an interesting concept to read about nevertheless.
