DELL PowerEdge 860 and Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet poor performance.

[Jean-Claude MICHOT]

The server is a DELL PowerEdge 860 freshly installed with
FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4 (GENERIC Kernel).

pciconf and part of boot information:

bge0 at pci0:4:0:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x01e61028 chip=0x165914e4 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Corporation'
    device     = 'BCM5721 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
bge1 at pci0:5:0:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x01e61028 chip=0x165914e4 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Corporation'
    device     = 'BCM5721 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

bge0: <Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Controller, ASIC rev. 0x4101> mem 0xfe5f0000-0xfe5fffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci4
miibus0: <MII bus> on bge0
brgphy0: <BCM5750 10/100/1000baseTX PHY> PHY 1 on miibus0
brgphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
bge0: Ethernet address: 00:1c:23:e1:78:7e
bge0: [ITHREAD]
bge1: <Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Controller, ASIC rev. 0x4101> mem 0xfe3f0000-0xfe3fffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci5
miibus1: <MII bus> on bge1
brgphy1: <BCM5750 10/100/1000baseTX PHY> PHY 1 on miibus1
brgphy1:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
bge1: Ethernet address: 00:1c:23:e1:78:7f
bge1: [ITHREAD]

There's no problem with input throughput (upto 980 Mbits) but output 
throughput never go upper to 540 Mbits :(

Just for test, i have add to this server an Intel Gigabit Ethernet board 
(em) and there's no problem to output data up to around 980 Mbits with
this addon board.

If i boot the server with Linux Ubuntu, there's no output throughput 
problem with Broadcom, so it seem to be FreeBSD bge driver problem.

I'm not the only one to have poor output performance with bge on        
DELL PowerEdge 860
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-June/014373.html

I have also try various patch or setup driver default values
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-November/015951.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-November/015956.html

But all theses attempts to get better ouput performance was unsuccessful :(

Any idea are welcome.

PS: If it's usefull to debug and try to fix the problem, i can provide 
    root access to a DELL PE860 test server with bge.

-- 
UNIX is user-friendly. it's just selective about who its friends are.