Larry McVoy wrote:
quoted text
> A short summary is "can someone please post a test program that sources
> and sinks data at the wire speed?"  because apparently I'm too old and
> clueless to write such a thing.

Here's a simple reference tcp source/sink that's I've used for years. 
For example, on a couple gigabit machines:

$ ./tcpsend -t10 dew
Sent 1240415312 bytes in 10.033101 seconds
Throughput: 123632294 B/s

   -John