Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2003 09:22:16 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Preferred Gigabit interfaces for -CURRENT Message-ID: <3E453CC8.6A93E760@mindspring.com> References: <15939.2823.45299.471388@canoe.velocet.net> <200302080049.00472.wes@softweyr.com>
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Wes Peters wrote: > On Friday 07 February 2003 01:25, David Gilbert wrote: > > 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. I personally really like the Tigon III. It doesn't have the alignment issues that some of the cards do, so you get to avoid the m_pullup() (and the copy that happenes with it, in tcp_input()), since it can scatter/gather to an unaligned address. It's also the first card I'm aware of that does the full range of checksum offloading, without slowing the card down, which (finally!) lets you offload some of the network processing to the card (i.e. it does IP, TCP, and UDP). The card itself does interrupt coelescing in hardware, and you can adjust both the trigger and buffer thresholds from the driver. Using 64bit 66MHz slots, it's possible to keep two interfaces completely loaded, while retaining sufficient CPU and bus bandwidth to actually do other work (though, in general, you will want to tune your stack, and replace the mbuf allocator). About the only complaint I really have about it is that, unlike the Tigon II, now that Broadcomm got their grubby little hands on it, unlike Alteon, they are refusing to make the firmware sources available so people can do useful work in the context of the firmware. Actually, there are some really brilliant things you can do, if you can replace the firmware, that can take you up to theoretical max packets a second very easily and quickly. We were able to get in the neighborhood of 31,000 connections per second with the Tigon III, alll other things being equal, even before FreeBSD added the SYN cache and SYN cookie code. Is there a particular reason you don't like the card, or at least prefer the other card more? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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