[ih] order of source and destination address in IP header

[John Kristoff]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:48:19 -0500 (EST)
jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:

> (In any event, looking at it from the viewpoint of being able to process
> it in hardware, there's only limited utility to being able to read the
> destination IP address early. For one, you don't need to see it quickly
> to know if the packet's for you - i.e. you need to read the whole thing
> in - by definition, the network-level header says that it is. For
> another, if there's a speed mismatch, you can't do "cut-through" routing,
> you'll have to buffer the whole packet anyway. The same thing is true if
> the output network is shared, and busy.)

It might also be nice to be able to get and verify the header checksum
to see if you wouldn't be better off just throwing it away.

John