Thoughts on increasing MTUs on the internet
Iljitsch van Beijnum
iljitsch at muada.com
Thu Apr 12 11:03:45 UTC 2007
On 12-apr-2007, at 12:02, Pierfrancesco Caci wrote:
> wouldn't that work only if the switch in the middle of your neat
> office lan is a real switch (i.e. not flooding oversize packets to
> hosts that can't handle them, possibly crashing their NIC drivers) and
> it's itself capable of larger MTUs?
Well, yes, being compatible with stuff that doesn't support larger
packets pretty much goes without saying. I don't think there is any
need to worry about crashing drivers, packets that are longer than
they should are a common error condition that drivers are supposed to
handle without incident. (They often keep a "giant" count.)
A more common problem would be two hosts that support jumboframes
with a switch in the middle that doesn't. So it's necessary to test
for this and avoid excessive numbers or large packets when something
in the middle doesn't support them.
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