modern NIC to use a mellanox connectx-4

From: Benoit Chesneau <benoitc_at_enki-multimedia.eu>
Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:31:09 UTC
Hi all,

Reading the Freebsd 14.0 changes it seems that netfli xsponsors the removal of old drivers. Not sure what it means exactly, but as of todaty which kind of full featured NIC for servers we can use that bring at least 2x25G ? By full featured I mean good support of SR-IOV and netmap though I am not sure if netmap is considered stable.

For now all my hardware has a mellanox connectx-4 Lx 2xx25G which has its problems:

```
mlx5_core0@pci0:17:0:0: class=0x020000 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x15b3 device=0x1015 subvendor=0x1590 subdevice=0x00d4
vendor = 'Mellanox Technologies'
device = 'MT27710 Family [ConnectX-4 Lx]'
class = network
subclass = ethernet
PCI-e errors = Correctable Error Detected
Unsupported Request Detected
Corrected = Advisory Non-Fatal Error
mlx5_core1@pci0:17:0:1: class=0x020000 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x15b3 device=0x1015 subvendor=0x1590 subdevice=0x00d4
vendor = 'Mellanox Technologies'
device = 'MT27710 Family [ConnectX-4 Lx]'
class = network
subclass = ethernet
PCI-e errors = Correctable Error Detected
Unsupported Request Detected Corrected = Advisory Non-Fatal Error
```

But it appears that SR-IOV barely works on it: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=270859

Also speed with SR-IOV is half of the bandwidth I could get.

Netmap works weirdly and ipperf3 makes the kernell panic when used with udp mode. Not sure what could be done for it.

Any feedback is welcome :)

Benoît Chesneau, Enki Multimedia
—
t. +33608655490

Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.