nfe driver 6.2 stable

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 12:57:23AM +0100, Chris wrote:
> nfe0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
>         options=8<VLAN_MTU>
>         inet x.x.x.x netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast x.x.x.x
>         inet x.x.x.x netmask 0xffffffff broadcast x.x.x.x
>         ether x
>         media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX <full-duplex>)
>         status: active
> 
> 1 - is there a man page for nfe anywhere?

Closest thing I can find would be the manpage from -CURRENT's nfe(4),
which is supposedly the same code.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=nfe&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+7-current&format=html

> 2 - does it support hardware checksum I remember reading it does but
> from ifconfig output it appears to not be in use so if it does support
> it how do I enable it?

It does support it, but I don't know the circumstances surrounding when
it gets enabled.  That is to say, it's known that some versions of the
chip (and/or associated PHY) have bugs, so possibly hardware checksum
offloading is known to be broken on the system you're on.  Taken from my
7-CURRENT box at home (Asus A8N-E, nForce 4-based):

nfe0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=10b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,TSO4>
        ether 00:15:f2:17:30:e9
        inet 192.168.1.51 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        media: Ethernet 1000baseTX <full-duplex>
        status: active

I do not explicitly specify rxcsum or txcsum in my rc.conf ifconfig
line.

> 3 - same with TOS?

TOS (type-of-service) or TSO?  If TSO, see above ifconfig.

> 4 - how do I enable jumbo frames if it supports it?

You should take a bit more itme to read the webpage you obtained the
driver from.  I see these on the page:

2007/01/06	Added jumbo frame support. [...] Fixed a bug to handle
		Tx/Rx checksum offload settings with ifconfig.
2006/08/11	Added support for jumbo frame capability.

yongari@ (Pyun YongHyeon) should be able to provide additional help
with both.

> 5 - is it safe to use with zero copy sockets?

No idea.

> 6 - I currently have both net.isr.direct and mpsafenet disabled is
> this driver safe to use on them?

No idea.

-- 
| 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 |