Re: [Xen-devel] Question about TCP checksum offload in Xen

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2013-12-05 at 11:29 +0000, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 01:00:23PM +0000, Balraj Singh wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm working on verifying TCP checksums on incoming packets in Mirage, but
> > I've run into a bit of a problem.
> > 
> > If TCP checksum offload is turned on on a virtual interface (this is the
> > default), and if the TCP connection is local to the machine, it looks like
> > Xen does not calculate the checksum at all.  This may be valid because Xen
> > may be providing a stronger guarantee, but it means that incoming packets
> > don't have a valid checksum in the header.  This then means that in Mirage
> > we can't just have checksum verification turned on all the time.  This
> > would have been the safe fall back option and detecting that checksum
> > offload is on, and then not duplicating the verification in Mirage would
> > have been an optimisation.  But it looks like this is not an option.  Now I
> > need to know for every incoming packet whether checksum verification should
> > be done or not.  It should ideally be for every packet since chksum offload
> > can be turned off and on on the VIF and existing tcp connections should
> > continue.  If not every packet, I need to get a notification or efficiently
> > detect right away that the setting is changed on the VIF.
> 
> This is a question that seems to keep coming up even for Linux and
> Windows, as the combination of local<->local VMs vs local<->off-host and
> the checksum offload is quite confusing.
> 
> CCing xen-devel: is the appropriate behaviour for a guest VM that wants to
> use checksum offloading in all situations documented anywhere?

I don't understand the question/concern. If you have enabled checksum
offload then of course you don't recalculate the checksum, that's the
whole point of offloading it.

Ian.