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."

Greenmail

[redelm]

This sounds like just another step in royalty / licencing negotiations.

Re:Greenmail

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Exactly. And of course the SlashSnot crowd is totally hypocritical on this because they are too blinded by anger at the big bad Microsoft to realize that this is just another obnoxious software patent. The "my enemy's enemies are my friend" is typical selfish crap that devalues clear thinking.

Re:Greenmail

[truthsearch]

Generally I'd agree with you. And I'm entirely against software patents. But consider Microsoft's actions while software patents are legal:

"Alacritech claims that it discussed its technology with Microsoft in 1998 and that Microsoft subsequently cut off communication with the company. In May 2003, Microsoft demonstrated a technology it called "Chimney" that Alacritech said was similar to its own intellectual property. Alacritech offered Microsoft a license, but Microsoft rejected Alacritech's terms, and

Re:Greenmail

[RogueLeaderX]

Let's consider a hypopethetical world where software patents are illegal and Microsoft tried this. Alacritech sues Microsoft for breach of contract and wins. Some result, no messy patent system. Not a critique of your statement, a critique of the patent system.

Re:Greenmail

[drsmithy]

Let's consider a hypopethetical world where software patents are illegal and Microsoft tried this. Alacritech sues Microsoft for breach of contract and wins.

In your hypothetical world there wouldn't be anything they could sue them about - Microsoft going off and reimplementing someone else's software on their own would be perfectly legal.

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)

Re:Been done.

[BrookHarty]

This is more than "A network card with a CPU", its also the technology "SLIC" to go along with the ASIC card. SLIC was copied by Microsoft after meeting with Alacritech, and then Microsoft saying they invented it, and broke all communications.

Now, Microsoft might say that the technology already existed, but its too specialized, with parts on the CPU and parts on the Network card. I suspect Microsoft will just license the technology and end suit but not after trying years of legal bills.

http://www.alacri [alacritech.com]

Re:Been done.

[superpulpsicle]

Well about the iSCSI part, I think it almost doesn't matter. Fibre-channel is clearly the dominate protocol in the storage industry right now.

HPUX

[Asgard]

I seem to recall hearing that the old HPUX machines had a sort of smart-NIC; the machine could be completely crashed and yet ping still worked.

What the PDP's used in 1969

[ScrappyLaptop]

Honeywell DDP-516's a.k.a. IMP's. An entire freestanding computer just to offload the network traffic! So robust that you could hook just the IMPs up to the 'network' and have them communicate amongst themselves -WITHOUT THEIR HOST COMPUTERS!

A little perspective: A $10 NIC is 'smart' enough with the system turned off to monitor traffic for smart packets meant for its MAC...

Different from 3COM?

[snookerdoodle]

'Just an honest question (ok, 2 questions): don't some of 3COM's NIC's do something similar? Is the difference just a matter of the degree of offloading?

Mark

Re:Different from 3COM?

[soldack]

Windows (and Linux for that matter) support offloading checksum calculations. Windows also support large sends where segmentation is offloaded. Finally windows supports ipsec offload.
All of the top NICs (3com, broadcom, intel) support this. Microft was working on offloading all of TCP/IP processing. In theory, the NICs have ASICs and/or network processors that can handle high speed (think > 1 gigabit) TCP/IP processing and the OS just gives it data to send and a place to receive.

Depending on what yo

Dupe

[jleq]

Duplicate post, see http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/21 59255