The LANforge system can severely stress the capabilities of many ethernet drivers and the Linux kernel networking subsystems. We have gathered some patches here that we think will increase the performance and/or reliability of the Linux kernel. These patches are often gathered from all over the internet, and we will try to credit the original author when that person is known.

NOTE: These patches are not all 100% tested, so use at your own risk! You may instead wish to use the consolidated patch provided with each LANforge release or use a pre-built kernel from our Downloads page. Consolidated Candela patches include tested versions of the patches below and are named similar to: candela_2.4.25.patch.

For a listing of all files, including the consolidated patches, see: Directory Listing

Patch	Author(s)	Description
Pktgen (RH 2.4.18-5) Pktgen (2.4.20-pre9)	Robert Olsson Ben Greear	This patch is a significant re-write of Robert's pktgen tool. This patch allows line-speed traffic generation on 10/100Mbps NICs, and near line speed on Gigabit NICs. The LANforge Armageddon feature uses pktgen as it's generator module.
Send-to-Self (RH 2.4.18-5) Send-to-Self (2.4.20-pre9)	Ben Greear	This patch allows a machine to send TCP/IP and UDP/IP packets to itself over an external interface. (Normally, this type of connection will just route internally and will generate no external traffic.)
NAPI & SKB-Recycle (2.4.20-pre9)	Robert Olsson Ben Greear	This patch contains Robert Olsson's skb-recycle patch, and also has Ben Greear's patch to allow sysctl to tune the 'budget' that the NAPI drivers use. This ability to tune makes traffic flow more smoothly when there are many interfaces running at high speeds. The skb-recycle patch allows interfaces to recycle skbs so that there is less need to malloc memory in the interrupt handlers.
Tulip Ethernet Driver (2.4.20-pre9)	Various	This patch is an update to the tulip driver found in the 2.4.20-pre9 kernel. It is tuned to have larger receive buffers. It is also patched to take advantage of Robert's skb-recycle patch, as well as the NAPI patch.