New BETA of Broadcom 440x chipset driver

Duncan Barclay dmlb at dmlb.org
Mon Aug 25 13:56:25 PDT 2003


Hi

I think I have fixed the RX packet loss and memory corruption problems with
the previous version of the driver. Please try the code at

http://people.freebsd.org/~dmlb/bcm-0308252140.tar.gz

I have manged to get full link speed ftping large files in both direction.
Also, I have successfully populated an empty /usr/src tree with cvsup whilst
up and downloading 50MB files.

Would people please try this and feed back good and bad experiences. I would
be interested if people could run their favorite net bench marks with the
hw.bcm_rx_quick sysctl set to 1 (default) and 0. Setting to zero forces the
driver to copy data from the NIC, one causes the driver to do a small 44
byte memory shuffle. Whilst wire speed should not differ, time spent in the
interrupt routine should be less with the sysctl set to 1.

Please do not use on a "valuable" system. The problem that this release
tries to fix sometimes resulted in kernel memory corruption.

All the best

Duncan



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