Marvell 88E8052 PCI-E LAN on FreeBSD 7.0

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:33:34AM -0000, Graham Bentley wrote:
> Hi ALl,
>
> I have a DFI LanParty Mobo that includes Marvells 88E8052
> and 88E8053 LAN IF.
>
> Using the module with 7.0 [msk] the network preformance
> is terrible, Opera / Links stall, or wont page load at
> all although pings to the router are fine?
>
> I then tried using Marvells own driver the website [myk]
> and the results where about the same.
>
> Just before I was about to give up and put in my trusty
> old 3Com 3C509 [xl] I noticed that in the Marvell doco
> there where several tunable params so decided to try
> out a few.
>
> I discovered that adding -txcsum and -rxcsum (i.e.
> disabling hardware checksuming) to the ifconfig
> statement, the performance was as quick as it is
> on that other OS!

Yong-Hyeon Pyun can probably explain what's going on here.  I've CC'd
him on this mail; he usually hangs out on -stable though.

You need to keep something in mind here: Marvell does not give out
documentation for their cards publicly, so Yong-Hyeon has to
reverse-engineer and "tinker" with what he already knows.  Some hardware
feature do not work, others are buggy, others work fine on specific
revisions of the chip while later ones break.

And if you tell me "Well Linux has support for this chip!", I will throw
the following evidence back in your face: Marvell and other companies
are giving Linux developers development PCI cards to develop drivers
with (sometimes even before the card is out in the market), so Linux has
the upper hand here.  They are not doing this with the BSDs.

Purely as an example: in my Wiki, section "Network devices", see the
entry for the 88E8040 NIC.  I'm still working with Yong-Hyeon to try to
get him access to a laptop that has this chip so he can write the
driver.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues

This should give you some idea of the complexities.  As I said, Linux
has the upper hand, because they're getting support from Marvell.

> It seems that hw cs is on by default so I added the
> above to my ifoncfig line in /etc/rc.conf and now
> all is snappy!
>
> I was wondering how could this be the case and also
> if anyone else had this issue with Marvell chips?

I would urge you to go out and purchase an Intel Pro/1000 PT card, which
runs for around 30-40 USD.  It's good to have a spare NIC on hand
anyways -- your 3C509 xl(4) based NIC probably won't cut it, especially
if you're complaining about performance.  :-)  No one uses those cards
any more except individuals running on hardware from 1997, which you are
obviously not.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |