Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
What’s the Problem As I was using my Protocol Analyzer, I noticed a bunch of packets that had TCP
CRC errors. The packets were all from my PC, but everything was working fine. I noticed that there weren’t any IP checksum errors, UDP Errors or ICMP checksum
errors. I also noted that SYN, FIN TCP packets were fine as well.
Thanks goes to my friends at Wildpackets for informing me as to what was happening.
I just thought I would put some more info together for myself and for all my faithful readers.
Enjoy
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
TCP/IP Task Offload in NDIS 5 From: http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/network/taskoffload.asp
Network adapters with appropriate NDIS 5 (and later) miniport drivers can increase the system performance by supporting hardware offload of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) CPU-intensive tasks. For example, with TCP/IP checksum offload alone, up to 30 percent performance gain in CPU utilization has been seen in testing at Microsoft. The NDIS interface and the TCP/IP transport have been enhanced to allow miniport drivers to indicate hardware support for performing:
TCP/IP checksum calculation. TCP/IP segmentation. Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) Encryption Ciphers and Message Digests.
During initialization or when an interface appears as a Plug and Play event, the TCP/IP driver will query the miniport through the NdisRequest() mechanism with an object ID (OID) of OID_TCP_TASK_OFFLOAD in order to find out which offload capabilities the network adapter supports.
For each task the network adapter can offload, it will return an NDIS_TASK_OFFLOAD structure that contains an indication of the task supported and parameters specific to that task. The protocol then enables the appropriate tasks by submitting a set request containing the NDIS_TASK_OFFLOAD structures for those tasks. At this point, these tasks are enabled for offload. The network adapter will receive information specific to the task on a per-packet basis, along with each packet.
Checksum Offload
On the send side, the network adapter that supports this offload will calculate checksums that are needed and for which it has indicated the capability of performing. For the TCP checksum, the Microsoft transport will calculate the TCP pseudo header checksum and place this value in the checksum field, so that the network adapter can calculate the correct TCP checksum without touching the IP header.
On the receive side, the network adapter will fill in a NDIS_TCP_IP_CHECKSUM_PACKET_INFO structure and set the appropriate bits. If for any reason the network adapter cannot perform the checksum, it will not set any bits and indicate the packet. TCP/IP will then look at this and calculate the appropriate checksum itself.
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
What Does It Look Like With Wildpackets
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
What Does It Look Like With NAI
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
What Does It Look Like With Fluke
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
What Does It Look Like With Ethereal
© 2003, The Technology Firm WWW.THETECHFIRM.COM
Card Configuration Details In my case I had a 3COM 3C920 and I simply disabled the Tx Checksum Offload and
everything is back to normal.
