FreeBSD nve(4) driver

[Benjamin Lutz]

Hello,

I'd like to report on the nve(4) driver and it's support of my on-board 
NIC on my MSI K8N Neo2 Mainboard (which is a nForce3 board). Dmesg says:

  nve0: <NVIDIA nForce MCP7 Networking Adapter> port 0xb800-0xb807 mem
        0xee005000-0xee005fff irq 21 at device 5.0 on pci0
  nve0: Ethernet address 00:11:09:65:fc:0d
  miibus1: <MII bus> on nve0
  nve0: Ethernet address: 00:11:09:65:fc:0d
 
in nve.c, you write:
> NVIDIA now support the nForce3 AMD64 platform, however I have been
> unable to access such a system to verify support. However, the code is
> reported to work with little modification when compiled with the AMD64
> version of the NVIDIA Linux library. All that should be necessary to
> make the driver work is to link it directly into the kernel, instead of
> as a module, and apply the docs/amd64.diff patch in this source
> distribution to the NVIDIA Linux driver source.

I've not done any patching, but I've simply kldloaded if_nve. This machine 
is running:

  $ uname -mrs
  FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 amd64

The NIC is working, I can ping etc. However, when there isn't any network 
activity, I'm starting to see these messages, with the timeout occurring 
about every 30 seconds:

  nve0: device timeout (1)
  nve0: link state changed to DOWN
  nve0: link state changed to UP
  nve0: device timeout (1)
  nve0: link state changed to DOWN
  nve0: link state changed to UP
  nve0: device timeout (2)
  nve0: link state changed to DOWN
  nve0: link state changed to UP
  ...

If you'd like me to run tests, I can do that.

While I'm here - this mainboard also has a second on-board NIC, which uses 
a RealTek 8169S. Comments in the code for the re(4) driver say that the 
driver takes advantage of the 8169S' RX/TX checksum offloading. It would 
appear that despite the name, that chip isn't so bad. How does the MCP7 
in combination with nve(4) compare? Which of the two chips do you 
recommend I use under FreeBSD?

Cheers
Benjamin
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