Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2003 13:32:29 +0000 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Preferred Gigabit interfaces for -CURRENT Message-ID: <200302081332.29146.wes@softweyr.com> In-Reply-To: <3E453CC8.6A93E760@mindspring.com> References: <15939.2823.45299.471388@canoe.velocet.net> <200302080049.00472.wes@softweyr.com> <3E453CC8.6A93E760@mindspring.com>
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On Saturday 08 February 2003 17:22, Terry Lambert wrote:
> 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.
Yeah, a prototype Xylan GigE switch blade was done with Tigon-II's and
we did a bit of hacking in the firmware. They were pretty cool; we
used the usual Xylan SPARC processors on the card only for bus and
chassis management and did most of the cool packet stuff in the Tigon
itself.
> 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?
Our testing, which mostly comprised throwing a pair of cards into
a system, turning on bridging and blasting it with a SmartBits,
showed the Intels to be faster with less CPU load. The Intel cards
were 2x the price, but still well within our rather permissive
budget. When you're putting 4, 8, or even 16 GB DDR RAM into a
box the cost of a pair of network cards isn't significant. ;^)
If I were buying a card myself, I'd likely go with the NetGear
because it's cheap and it works, but you well know I'm a cheapskate.
Not having access to the doco suxxors.
--
Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?
Wes Peters wes@softweyr.com
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