DYNAMIC ENABLEMENT OF LSO (LARGESEND OFFLOAD) IN NETWORK VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT FOR BETTER NETWORK THROUGHPUT

Abstract

LSO is a very important feature of a GigE/10G NICs providing a good amount of performance benefits. Using this feature Network layers can send bigger packets instead of smaller packets. On virtualized environmentNetwork Interface Card(NIC) will be attached to VIOS(Virutal IO servers) and logical partitions will be sharing this NIC through virtualization technique. In these kind of environment, LSO feature can be turned on/off on the NIC, the bridge layerSEA (Shared Ethernet Adapter) present in VIOS and in the virtual adapter present in logical partition. LSO need to be enabled in all these components to exploit this feature. If LSO is turned off on the bridge(SEA) present in the VIOS, will cause poor network performance. In this paper, method to achieve better network throughput when LSO feature is turned off/on dynamically is being proposed in this draft.