RE: FCIP/iFCP : Guarantee In-Order delivery for FC N/NL_ports

[Black_David@emc.com]

> The FC frame is placed on FC network within a short time of its arrival or
> there is no advantage in allowing out of sequence processing. 

The "there is no advantage" statement depends on
the architecture of the implementation.  As usual,
Doug continues to confuse out of order placement
and processing - some FCIP implementations may be
able to take advantage of out of order placement;
out-of-order processing and forwarding would violate
TCP's in order delivery semantics and cause other
problems as described earlier in this thread.

Some sort of timestamp approach from FCIP to FCIP
(i.e., across TCP transmission and delivery) seems
like a reasonable way to deal with issues that could
cause an issue with FC fabric timeouts.  It's also
the case that the FC fabric timeouts need to be set
with some regard to the presence and characteristics
of FCIP links.

--David
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