which 10GE cards are supported by FreeBSD ?

[Ben Hutchings]

On Sat, 2011-09-24 at 13:56 -0700, Juli Mallett wrote:
> 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.
[...]

Sorry, our current hardware can't move 64-byte frames at 10G line rate.
I can check what the maximum packet rate is if you're interested.

We will have a FreeBSD driver out real soon now(TM), but most of my work
on performance has gone into improving throughput.  (The latency should
be pretty good if you turn off interrupt moderation, though.)  And
really I think Onload is more useful than netmap, since it's compatible
with existing source and binaries.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.