Do the Broadcom Gigabit drivers support TOE on Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

https://access.redhat.com/articles/8707

TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine) is not included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and will not be supported for the reasons listed below. Additionally, TOE has not been accepted in upstream kernel and will most likely not be included in future distributions.

TOE in general has more downsides than advantages:

1. Latency increases, which means that for lots of stuff, like performance, decreases.

2. The Linux TCP/IP stack is quite fast already, the performance gain of TOE is not that significant. Especially for properly written applications that use zero copy and TSO (TCP Segmentation Offloading).

3. You can not combine firewalling with TOE (which presents a big problem).

4. You can not combine traffic shaping with TOE.

5. You can not combine QoS (Quality of Service) with TOE.

6. You can not fix bugs in the TCP/IP implementation on the TOE card if they arrise, nor can you add support for newer protocol extensions like ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification).