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Date:      Fri, 7 Feb 2003 14:59:16 +0100 (CET)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de>
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Preferred Gigabit interfaces for -CURRENT
Message-ID:  <200302071359.h17DxG0U076631@lurza.secnetix.de>
In-Reply-To: <freebsd-current.15939.2823.45299.471388@canoe.velocet.net>

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David Gilbert <dgilbert@velocet.ca> 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).

As far as I know, all of the GigE cards do hardware checksums
anyway.  Those which support VLAN de/muxing in hardware are
listed in the vlan(4) manpage and in the respective interface
manpages (bge, em, gx etc.) -- I think most of them do, if
not all.

 > 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.
 > 
 > 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.

That's the Broadcom BCM570x chipset (bge driver).  It's only
inofficially called "Tigon III" because it's based on the
Tigon I/II from Alteon.

Having said that -- We do have a bunch of Compaq DL360-G2
machines in production, each of which has two of those bge
interfaces.  We make heavy use of VLANs, and the performance
is very good.  However, we're running 4.7 (because they are
production servers), and our packet profile is probably very
different from yours (most of the traffic is NFS, HTTP, SQL
queries and similar things).

Regards
   Oliver

PS:  "a bunch" == about 20 of them, more to come.

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe)

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