HEADS UP: E1000 networking changes in STABLE/7.1 RELEASE

[Paul]

Hi Jack.  Will the em driver ever support the multiple hardware queues 
of the 82571 or are we just stuck with the standard em driver?
Has there been any significant change in the em driver itself ?
I have a feeling that the 82571 should be in the igb driver but for some 
reason it isn't. 
I am curious because we have a LOT of 4 port 82571 PCI-E cards and they 
are not cheap.  :]

Thanks

Paul

Jack Vogel wrote:
> There is a change that has been in the STABLE tree for a few months,
> but many might have missed it,
> its an important change to note and possibly for some prepare for with
> the 7.1 RELEASE.
>
> There is a new E1000 network driver, igb, which supports two family of
> adapters so far: the
> 82575 and the new 82576.  In FreeBSD 7 the support for 82575 was in
> the em driver, however
> due to support issues across all the OS's we do drivers for, the
> decision was made to split the
> newer drivers off from those before. There are big differences in the
> register set, and in things
> like the descriptor format that made this expedient.
>
> I made the support for the 82575 available very early in FreeBSD,
> earlier even than Linux so
> that certain vendors could have a working driver early. At first I
> thought to avoid splitting the
> driver, but support issues are going to make that impractical. So
> there is a split, its been in
> HEAD since Febuary, and now 7.1 will release with this change.
>
> What this means is that if you have 82575 adapters in a system they
> are going to change
> from being 'emX' to being 'igbX', in the RELEASE the install kernel
> will have both drivers
> in it, but on an upgrade path, or using a set of scripts that get
> postinstalled you need to
> be ready to make this change.
>
> How can you tell if you have such a device: Simple, use pciconf, there
> are only 3 ID's
> that are effected:  0x10A7, 0x10A9, and 0x10D6.
>
> If you have questions feel free to email me.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jack Vogel
> Intel Lan Access Division
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