HEADS UP: E1000 networking changes in STABLE/7.1 RELEASE

[Paul]

Nice.. Now if they would just optimize the IP stack for SMP and the rest 
of the drivers we may have a piece of equipment and OS
that will compete with the hardware vendor routers :)   Full BGP, a few 
million pps(I hope), and filters.. Nothing does that right now short of
Juniper M7i or Cisco SUP720-3b/cxl or 72xx, etc..  Of course the first 2 
do it way faster but are also very expensive.

Linux is backwards on packet forwarding until they get rid of the route 
cache, it's almost useless in a service provider environment (millions 
of flows and
hundreds of thousands of new flows per second for instance), although 
it's still the most flexible.

Please keep us updated on any interesting changes to the em/igb/ixgb :>  
I have ordered an 82575 card and will be testing it along with some 
other CPUs to fire up my routing performance thread again :> :>

Paul


> The Linux team here implemented multiqueue based on 82571 3 or 4 years ago,
> they found that without MSIX it just caused more problems than it was worth
> and they turned it off again until recently.
>
> Linux is in a better position right now, Dave Miller has been hacking madly at
> their stack and they have pretty complete multiqueue support in the stack. One
> of my friends here at Intel was responsible for a lot of the work and code along
> the way.
>
> I know there's stack work going on, hopefully all drivers will benefit from that
> as it comes out. Also Kip Macy has been doing some work for a customer
> that is based on my igb code, he promised to have some patches back to me
> in a couple weeks, I'm sure it will be good stuff too.
>
> I do not know how hard 82576 is to get right now, it has a TON of potential
> that I have no where near tapped yet. Before the firedrill the last couple of
> days I had started on updating the ioatdma driver, which we need so that
> I can put DCA into the igb driver (Direct Cache Access), that should be a
> big performance enhancer when I can get it done.
>
> Jack
>
>