Re: iSCSI: Markers

[Stephen Bailey <steph@cs.uchicago.edu>]

> As for COWS, it's clearly nasty.  Even if you're doing CRC, it adds a
> significant increment to the processing cost.

Unfortunately, all the choices are nasty.  Long time IETFers would
probably make the point that this is an indication we are trying to do
the wrong thing and should just use a message-based transport :^)

That said, one position that many people thought was the least nasty
was key/length-based TUF (with TCP sender segmentation support), or
nothing at all (== full reassembly).  A smaller number of `key'
participants felt that an intermediary framing solution for stock TCP
senders was necessary.

We proposed COWS-based TUF to try to bring harmony to the spheres, but
I'm not hearing the pleasant resonance (piano tuning is an emperical
process, right?), so perhaps we didn't get it quite right.

Absent any unification of sender segmentation-based and stock TCP
framing (perhaps 0-touch sends ARE too much to give up), I'm strongly
in the sender segmentation-based framing (TUF) or nothing at all camp.

Steph