"I was working on NICs at Sun Microsystems through most of this timeline. I left in late 2000. In my recollection at least, NFS/UDP was not a strong incentive to use jumbo frames. NFS added TCP support sometime in the mid 1990s. By the late 1990s when calls for jumbo frames were loudest, NFS over TCP was Sun's preferred deployment. You're correct that 9K was an 8K page plus headers. Even for TCP that would have been useful, as we wanted to use zero copy techniques to remap VM pages and avoid having to copy them into the kernel." - DGentry