Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 19:37:10 -0700 From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Suggestions for Gigabit cards for -CURRENT Message-ID: <20000203193710.A57242@panzer.kdm.org> In-Reply-To: <200002040229.VAA10541@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>; from wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu on Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 09:29:27PM -0500 References: <20000202113259.A43505@panzer.kdm.org> <200002040229.VAA10541@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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[ Thanks for the info Bill! ] On Thu, Feb 03, 2000 at 21:29:27 -0500, Bill Paul wrote: > Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Kenneth D. Merry had > to walk into mine and say: > > > The Netgear GA620 is a 512K Tigon 2 board, and generally goes for around > > $300 or so. The 3Com boards have 1MB of SRAM, but I'm not sure whether > > they're Tigon 1 or Tigon 2. You really want a Tigon 2 board. Maybe > > someone who has one can comment. > > The original 3Com 3c985 was a Tigon 1 board (I have one) and the 3c985B is > a Tigon 2. The Tigon 1 is no longer in production, though of course I try > to maintain support for it for those people who still have them. The Tigon 1 > had only a single R4000 CPU in it while the Tigon 2 has two. Ahh, that's good to know, I was wondering whether they had a Tigon 2 board out, since it would make a cheaper alternative to the 1MB ACEnic. > The Netgear GA620 is by far the cheapest at about $320. The various OEM > cards sold for the PC are usually around $600, give or take $100. The GA620 > only has 512K of SRAM compared to 1MB on most of the others, however you're > not likely to notice a problem with that unless you try to push the card > really hard with a really big TCP window size and jumbo frames. That has been my experience as well. > > The FreeBSD driver (written by Matt Jacob) is based on the Linux driver, > > which Intel wrote, and he hasn't yet managed to get decent throughput > > through the cards. (Maybe Matt will comment.) They also only have 64K of > > memory on board, which is insufficient for a heavily loaded server, IMO. > > > > Even with the 512K Alteon boards, you have a minimum of about 200K, and > > probably more like 300K of cache for transmit and receive. > > The Alteon cards also need a certain amount of SRAM to run the firmware. Yep, thus the 200K-300K number. The minimum amount of buffer that the board will configure is 64K for transmit buffers and 128K for receive buffers. It looks at the size of the firmware and associated data structures, and allocates the rest of the card memory for transmit and receive buffer space. > Both the Alteon and SysKonnect NICs are 64-bit PCI cards. (Actually, I'm > pretty sure all of the PCI gigabit NICs are 64-bit.) Both kinds of cards > can do jumbograms on FreeBSD. Also, both vendors have released pretty good > hardware documentation, which makes them good choices for custom applications, > if you're into that sort of thing. Alteon also provides firmware source, which can really come in handy. Do you know if SysKonnect has released firmware? Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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