Microsoft Sued Over TCP/IP offload technology

soldack writes "Microsoft has been working on a technology for full offload of TCP/IP processing in windows to a smart NIC. It was due to arrive in an update to Windows Server 2003 but never made it. Now know why: it appears they have been sued by Alacritech for patent violation and Alacritech has won an injunction. See this article on Microsoft Watch for a story on it and here for Alacritech's view on it. It is pretty interesting to see a little company trying to take on Microsoft for seemingly ripping them off and getting this far. It probably helps that they were founded by Larry Boucher, who "led the engineering team that developed the SCSI interface at Shugart Associates" and also founded Adaptec. See Alacritech's site for more. Lots of TOE/RNIC companies were effected by this since they were depending on Microsoft's software and do not have their own solution. This technology is becoming more important as the industry moves to multiple 1 gigabit interfaces and single or multiple 10 gigabit interfaces. It may be critical for technologies like iWarp (RDMA over TCP/IP) and iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP) to perform well."

Comments

Been done.

[bluGill]

Not with TCP/IP, but I've seen (not worked with) boards to offload network processing from the host machine. They ran in mainframes or VAXen, and other such large machines about 20 years ago. Never caught on though because you still need a reliable protocol to talk to the offload processor. (I was only aware that a box up on the top shelf contained such things, I'm not sure how they work, but could be prior art)