The Many Paths To Data Corruption

Runnin'Scared writes "Linux guru Alan Cox has a writeup on KernelTrap in which he talks about all the possible ways for data to get corrupted when being written to or read from a hard disk drive. This includes much of the information applicable to all operating systems. He prefaces his comments noting that the details are entirely device specific, then dives right into a fascinating and somewhat disturbing path tracing data from the drive, through the cable, into the bus, main memory and CPU cache. He also discusses the transfer of data via TCP and cautions, 'unfortunately lots of high performance people use checksum offload which removes much of the end to end protection and leads to problems with iffy cards and the like. This is well studied and known to be very problematic but in the market speed sells not correctness.'"

Comments

Iffy cards? Try crappy drivers

[timecop]

What "iffy cards" support TCP checksum offloading? You're not going to find that feature on a typical Realtek nic that's in a typicalslashdotuser's Linux box.
I think what the poster meant is there are dodgy Linux drivers for the said hardware, and quote, "for drivers/ide there are *lots* of problems with error handling", so to me it seems the problem is quite Linux specific and doesn't affect the rest of us who use a proper OS. I have no problem using Intel server GbE nics w/checksum offloading in Windows 2003 Server R2.