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Date:      Wed, 04 Aug 1999 10:38:14 -0400
From:      Bill Cerveny <cerveny@advanced.org>
To:        atm@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Performance tuning tips, comments on configuration
Message-ID:  <4.2.0.58.19990804100630.00a5e5a0@mail.advanced.org>

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First, does anyone have any performance tuning tips for getting optimal 
performance from the Fore ATM cards on FreeBSD?

Second, I am something of a "newbie" to FreeBSD, although I've got a bit of 
experience with other UNIX variants, including BSDI, Linux, Solaris, 
etc.  I'm also a little new to ATM.  It took me awhile to figure out how to 
make the Fore cards work on FreeBSD.  If I were to improve the 
documentation and/or installation instructions for the HARP stuff, I would 
add the following:

1) Provide better references about how to configure ATM cards using 
configuration values in /etc/rc.conf. After playing around with the "atm" 
command for some time, I discovered that rc.atm would do most of the work 
if /etc/rc.conf was populated correctly.  Examples of configuration values 
can be found in /etc/defaults/rc.conf, but better documentation of the 
configuration values would be great.

2) Indicate that changes must be made to the default FreeBSD kernel and 
what changes need to be made.  It wasn't intuitive to me to look in the 
"LINT" kernel config file for the values to make ATM work.

3) Examples of a few working configurations between FreeBSD systems and 
other systems would be useful. I finally found some examples in the mailing 
list and after contacting someone familiar with the HARP stuff, but it 
would be useful to provide examples of back-to-back connections between two 
FreeBSD boxes (which is what I had set-up) to get the implementor started.

4) Really emphasize that the correct Fore boot binary file can make or 
break your implementation and that with the wrong boot binary, things may 
appear to function somewhat.  I had used a pca200e.bin file from a 
commercial Fore driver for BSDI UNIX; it sort of worked, but acted strange 
at times and I never got connectivity. Someone else recommended a different 
version of the pca200e.bin file and the cards suddenly started working right.

If interested, I could attempt to write some documentation regarding the 
above for inclusion in future releases ...

Bill Cerveny
Advanced Network & Services


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