1.49. ethtool

An enhanced ethtool package that adds support for GRO options is now available.

Ethtool allows querying and changing of ethernet card settings, such as speed, port, autonegotiation, and PCI locations.

This updated package adds the following enhancement:

generic receive offload (GRO) has been added to some network drivers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4. GRO aggregates packets before they're processed by the rest of the stack. This allows TCP performance to be greatly enhanced at high speeds. In particular, it's crucial for good 10GbE performance. With GRO enabled, you should observe higher throughput, lower CPU utilization of network traffic, or both; especially with smaller message sizes.
The kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 allows users to manually control whether GRO is enabled for supported ethernet adapters. This updated ethtool provides a command-line interface -- "ethtool -k" -- for setting and querying that flag. (BZ#509398)

All ethtool users should upgrade to this updated package which adds this capability.