Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!proteon.COM!jas
From: jas@proteon.COM (John A. Shriver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.proteon
Subject: ethernet padding of small packets
Message-ID: <8810041426.AA22641@monk.proteon.com>
Date: 4 Oct 88 14:26:34 GMT
References: <8810040128.AA13546@violet.berkeley.edu>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 10

This was a mistake in the Proteon Ethernet (p4215) driver.  The
chipset on that board makes it the programmer's responsibility to pad
the packet.  The length we padded to was off by 4 (the size of the
CRC).  This is fixed in R8.1.  It was never a problem with the old
Interlan Ethernet (p4213/p4214), which did the padding for us in it's
microcode.

In general, IP implementations should allow for arbitrary padding of
packets.  For example, some versions of Wiscnet (VM) padded all
packets to a fixed physical length, whatever the IP length.