From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 23 12:33:35 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from crufty.research.bell-labs.com (crufty.research.bell-labs.com [204.178.16.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 417F337B41F; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 12:33:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scummy.research.bell-labs.com (H-135-104-2-10.research.bell-labs.com [135.104.2.10]) by crufty.research.bell-labs.com (8.12.2/8.12.2) with ESMTP id g3NJX2Xt045621; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:33:02 -0400 (EDT) Received: from aura.research.bell-labs.com (aura.research.bell-labs.com [135.104.46.10]) by scummy.research.bell-labs.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g3NJWuk11943; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:32:56 -0400 (EDT) Received: from fgupcmh (fgu-pcmh.research.bell-labs.com [135.104.47.121]) by aura.research.bell-labs.com (8.12.2/8.12.2) with SMTP id g3NJWSEJ008018; Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:32:28 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: From: "Fengrui Gu" To: , Cc: Subject: Problems with nge driver and copper GbE cards Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 15:32:38 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2911.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I am evaluating copper GbE cards for our lab. According to previous talk threads, it seems that SMC9462TX has better performance than NetGear cards. I bought two SMC9462TX cards and connect them through a Cat 5e cross-link cable. The machines in use are two dual PIII 733Mhz with 756MB memory. I use 32bit/33Mhz PCI slots. I know PCI bus of 32bit/33Mhz is slow but the major purpose of evaluation is to compare the performance between copper and Fiber GbE cards. There are another two identical dual PIII 733Mhz machines installed NetGear 620 Fiber GbE cards(using ti driver). So it is not an issue. I am using FreeBSD 4.5 and statically link nge driver into the kernel. First, there are a lot of "link up" messages from nge driver. I guess this has been reported. I use a small program to measure TCP performance. Basically, it sends 1G or 2G data over the network and calculate time and bit rate. The link between two copper GbE cards became unavailable after some TCP runs. There is no response from "ping". The kernel didn't report error messages except some new "link up" messages. There is no abnormal from the output of "ifconfig -a". Based on some suggestions(master or slave mode), I issued command "ifconfig nge0 link0". The link would be back sometimes but not always. Did anyone suffer the same problem? Second, it seems that the link is more stable with UDP traffic though it became unavailable now and then. I could manage to collect some UPD performance data: UDP performance(sender) w/o jumbo frame w/ jumbo frame copper GbE 510Mb/s 632Mb/s (SMC9462Tx) Fiber GbE 750Mb/s 856Mb/s (GA 620) (Note: data are from the results of netperf and shared the same parameters). Did anybody knows why copper GbE cards are so slow? Both copper and Fiber GbE cards are in the same kind of PCI slot and identical machines. The extra memory on GA620 should not cause 40-50% difference in my opinion. Third, I had trouble to set half-duplex mode on nge0. If I issued command "ifconfig nge0 media 1000baseTX mediaopt half-duplex", I got the following error message "ifconfig: SIOCSIFMEDIA: Device not configured" I don't have trouble to issue command "ifconfig nge0 media 1000baseTX mediaopt full-duplex". thanks, --Fengrui To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message