Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 8 Feb 2003 00:49:00 +0000
From:      Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
To:        David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Preferred Gigabit interfaces for -CURRENT
Message-ID:  <200302080049.00472.wes@softweyr.com>
In-Reply-To: <15939.2823.45299.471388@canoe.velocet.net>
References:  <15939.2823.45299.471388@canoe.velocet.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Friday 07 February 2003 01:25, David Gilbert wrote:
> We're about to make the switch from 100M interfaces to GigE interfaces
> for our transit routers ... which are FreeBSD-5.0 based SMP (Athlon)
> boxes.  Our current favorite card is the intel i82559-based fxp
> cards.  They handle the load best on our testing of 100M cards.
> Remember that our load is large and small packets and that hardware
> checksums are not a win (although hardware vlans are).
>
> So... I need to know what GigE chipsets I should test.  I recently
> tested Intel GigE cards ... with dismal results... less than half the
> packets-per-second on the (otherwise) same hardware.  Small packets
> (as in DOS attacks) are a real concern here.

Wow, this wasn't my experience at all.  At my previous employer we
used Intel EEPro 1000 Server cards with the em(4) driver on FreeBSD
4.5 with nary a hitch and excellent performance.  This was on
ServerWorks chipset motherboards with P-III and P4 processors.

> I believe that someone here recomended Tigon III based cards ... but I
> was recently looking through 5.0-RELEASE's hardware notes and couldn't
> find any mention of Tigon III.

The follow-on to the Tigon II is the Broadcom BCM570x supported by 
the bge(4) driver in FreeBSD.  This is not what you want.  They're
certainly cheap to test with, though; the Netgear GA302T sells for
under $40 at a few online retailers.

-- 

        Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?

Wes Peters                                               wes@softweyr.com


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200302080049.00472.wes>