Since a short while I have a gigabit setup at home. My laptop has a e1000 Intel NIC, my desktop a Broadcom NIC.While playing with Snort_inline and netpipe-tcp, I noticed something odd. I got tcp packets that had the ‘Don’t Fragment’ option set, but were still bigger than the mtu size of the link. Snort_inline read packets of up to 26kb from the queue, and wireshark and tcpdump were seeing the packets as well. This was only for outgoing packets on the e1000 NIC. The receiving pc saw the packets split up in multiple packets that were honoring the mtu size. This got me thinking that some form of offloading must be taking place and indeed this was the case:

# ethtool -k eth0
Offload parameters for eth0:
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: on

It can be disabled by using the following command:

# ethtool -K eth0 tso off

The large packets caused problems in my stream4inline modifications of Stream4. The code can’t handle the case where the packet is bigger than the sliding window size. So I have some work to do 😉