From owner-freebsd-current Fri Feb 7 5:59:20 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 897DF37B401 for ; Fri, 7 Feb 2003 05:59:18 -0800 (PST) Received: from lurza.secnetix.de (lurza.secnetix.de [212.66.1.130]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 95B4343FD7 for ; Fri, 7 Feb 2003 05:59:17 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from olli@lurza.secnetix.de) Received: from lurza.secnetix.de (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by lurza.secnetix.de (8.12.6/8.12.5) with ESMTP id h17DxGdK076632 for ; Fri, 7 Feb 2003 14:59:16 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from oliver.fromme@secnetix.de) Received: (from olli@localhost) by lurza.secnetix.de (8.12.6/8.12.5/Submit) id h17DxG0U076631; Fri, 7 Feb 2003 14:59:16 +0100 (CET) Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 14:59:16 +0100 (CET) Message-Id: <200302071359.h17DxG0U076631@lurza.secnetix.de> From: Oliver Fromme To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Preferred Gigabit interfaces for -CURRENT In-Reply-To: X-Newsgroups: list.freebsd-current User-Agent: tin/1.5.4-20000523 ("1959") (UNIX) (FreeBSD/4.7-RELEASE (i386)) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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). 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) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message