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A comment on Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission. Parent comment

Re:Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission by rjsw on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @04:49PM (#14705976)
A fair number of ethernet chips will handle all the TCP protocol themselves, the upper layers just pass in the address of a large buffer and the chip will take care of chopping it up into packets.

The feature is usually called a "TCP Offload Engine".

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Re:Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission by noselasd on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @05:24PM (#14706239)
That's hardly all the TCP protocol though, it's just the segmentation and checksumming part.
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Re:Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission by msbhvn on Wednesday July 05, 2017 @10:19PM (#14707720)
Segmentation and checksumming are very common, with the segmentation often called TSO (Transmission Segmentation Offload) for send and LRO (Large Receive Offload) for receive. However, usually when referred to as a TCP Offload Engine (ToE) it does mean pretty much the whole protocol, as least a functional subset of it anyway. Windows and FreeBSD support ToE with some NICs. Linux has rejected full ToE in mainline for a number of pretty solid reasons:

https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/toe

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