What does enabling hardware flow offloading do on unspported chipets?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Per my experience, despite the warning on LuCi's Firewall configuration page, both software and hardware flow offloading can be enabled regardless of the platform OpenWrt is running on.

I may have noticed some unexpected behavior from enabling hardware offloading (I've an open thread about the issue, but only now figured out a possible culprit), so I want to understand if it's working as intended or if I have stumbled upon a bug. (On mediatek/mt7622, Belkin RT3200)

Side note: why is Software flow offloading not enabled by default? I've found no wiki page for either software or hardware offloading, so I'm quite ignorant if there's any caveats that may accompany these options.

2

Addendum: RT3200 does apparently support hardware flow offloading? Then the problem I've encountered is definitely due to hardware offloading. I'll take my time to verify, but AFAICT software offloading and no offloading doesn't exhibit the problematic behavior.

Keeping this thread, because I still want to know the consequences of enabling it on unsupported hardware for future reference.

3

AFAIK, it falls back to software offloading.