which 10GE cards are supported by FreeBSD ?

[Juli Mallett]

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 13:52, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it> wrote:
> apart from the typo ("know know") yes the email contained three
> serious questions, two of which (third party drivers and shops
> which carry the card) i cannot answer looking at the tree.
>
> On top of this, some in-tree drivers may be stale, broken, redundant
> (say ixgb vs ixgbe), and so on.  And not all hardware can do line
> rate -- not even at 1G, let alone 10G, so it would be good to know
> also some first hand information on performance.

ixgb vs. ixgbe is not a stale/redundant issue.  ixgb only supports the
82597, which you'll find is not supported by ixgbe.

I think you'll have a hard time getting reliable performance
information.  There's a lot of smoke and mirrors about performance, as
you point out.  It has also been my experience that many 10g devices
cannot reliably do 1g line rate with minimal packet sizes.  I don't
fully understand why this is, but most people who I've seen give
performance numbers for FreeBSD are looking at bulk transmit, which is
of course not (necessarily) what you care about for netmap.  I've yet
to hear from anyone who can name a 10G NIC one can buy that can do
line rate with minimal packet sizes.  Solarflare boasts about lower
latency, so perhaps they'll have a better story in that area.

> The goal of the question was also to get -- and have on the archives,
> for the future -- informed feedback ("i have card X and works/does
> not work with driver Y and performance is Z", see Vlad's reply).

A wiki page would be nice.

> wow, that's a lot of information :)
>
> seriously though:
> i have Intel and know it works reasonably well and have published
> detailed data on that on the netmap page.  Vlad has replied about
> Myricom.  I know that Chelsio has a card and supports it.  But I
> have no first-hand information about the others: for instance, do
> we support Marvell ? which driver ?  What about broadcom ?  Any
> other makers&drivers for 10G on FreeBSD ?

Broadcom is bxe.  It's actually not as trivial to grep for 10G NICs as
implied, since some drivers have silly bugs, like ixgbe which sets
if_baudrate to '1000000000' (i.e. 1 000 000 000).