Compiling a TSO Patched Linux 2.6 Kernel

In http://www-didc.lbl.gov/TCP-tuning/linux.html∞ there has been reported that Linux 2.6.11 has a serious bug with Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet drivers and NICs that support "TCP Segmentation Offload" (TSO) such as the Intel ixgb and S2IO 10 GigE drivers.

A possible solution is to install a patched pre-release 2.6.12-rc3 kernel. This will be described below.

Install Cogito and GIT

To be able to retrieve the pre-released kernel source the Cogito and GIT tools have to be installed. This has been described in the ChangeLogs for the Rembrandt cluster entitled Install Cogito and GIT from 2005-05-23.

Retrieve the kernel sources

The kernel sources are obtained from the Linux kernel archive with the Cogito command:



To fixate this version for installation at the appropriate nodes an archive net-2.6.git.tar.bz2 has been created. In fact with the cg-clone command we obtained version 2.6.12-rc3, but the patch dscribed below also seem to work with this version.

Apply the TSO patch

The TSO patch new-tso.patch had been obtained via personal communication. In the unpacked net-2.6.git directory tree it could be applied with the command:



Kernel Compilation

The kernel compilation is now equivalent as described in Web100KernelInstallation or the kernel compilation part in ChelsioDriver with the remark that the extra verion has now been set to