nve related LOR triggered by lots of small packets, and a hard hang

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 06:53:31PM +0300, Sergey Zaharchenko wrote:
 > Hello John!
 > 
 > Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 09:10:12AM -0500 you wrote:
 > [snip]
 > > Have you tried using nfe(4)? :)
 > 
 > Now I have, and it works just fine, thanks (I somehow thought nfe was
 > specific to some platform). Why isn't it the default? Smaller range of
 > hardware supported?
 > 

AFAIK, nfe(4) supports more hardwares than that of nve(4).
Try overhauled nfe(4) in the following URL.

http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfe.c
http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfereg.h
http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfevar.h

The patch fixed serveral bugs in nfe(4) and it should perform better
than nve(4). The following hardware features are supported.
 o TSO
 o Tx/Rx IP/TCP/UDP checksum offload
 o VLAN hardware tag insertion/stripping
 o Jumbo frame(up to 9100 bytes)

It seems that the hardware supports MSI/MSI-X too but I don't have
nForce hardwares that supports MSI/MSI-X so it's hard to implement/
experiment it. Accoring to the Shigeaki Tagashira, the author of
FreeBSD nfe(4), his hardware claims to support 8 messages. I've
checked Linux forcedeth driver to get hardware information for
MSI/MSI-X but it I cound't understand the details. :-(

-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon