From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jul 16 18:14:48 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D65137B403 for ; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:14:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id VAA21847; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 21:14:34 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.3/8.9.1) id f6H1E5713549; Mon, 16 Jul 2001 21:14:05 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15187.37213.737818.957614@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 21:14:05 -0400 (EDT) To: Bsdguru@aol.com Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: NatSemi DP83820 gigE driver kit for 4.2 and 4.3 In-Reply-To: <3d.e7348af.2884818f@aol.com> References: <3d.e7348af.2884818f@aol.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid 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 Bsdguru@aol.com writes: > A more important question is "are these 32-bit cards, and if so, do they have > enough internal buffer to do sustained 1GB transfers". Generally 32-bit PCI > is too slow for GB, as it cant do sustained 1GB transfers. Some 32-bit GB > cards are just a total waste. The two cards that I have experience with are the Netgear GA622T and SMC9462TX. Both are 64-bit/66MHz cards. The first nge cards we tried were a pair of Netgear GA622T boards. They leave a lot to be desired. We put them in our Dell PowerEdge 4400 boxes (Serverworks chipset with interleaved ram and 64-bit/66MHz PCI, 733MHz Xeon) & hooked them up through our Extreme Summit 7i Gigabit switch (Copper). They have a decent packets/second rate for minimally sized packets (155,000 packets/sec or so), but they have serious trouble filling the link with UDP packets -- even with jumbo frames, I can't seem to push more than 450Mb/sec out of them. At this point, we figured the NatSemi DP8382x was just a lousy chipset, so we ordered a pair of SMC9462TX boards. Based on comments which used to be in the lge driver, we assumed that they used the Level 1 LXT1001 chips. However, we found out that the SMC9462TX boards that we have use the NatSemi DP8382x. (Perhaps the SMC9462SX uses the LXT1001?) We were pleasantly surprised to learn that the nge based SMC boards do perform well. Using the same hosts & switch as above, we can nearly fill the link with 1500 byte packets (950Mb/sec, I think). And they can also sustain more than 155,000 minimally sized packets/sec. They can easily fill the link with jumbo frames, but then there's that 8k tx fifo checksum limitation. Hope this helps, Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message