Mellanox MT25418 performance IPOIB?

[Karl Pielorz]

Hi All,

I've added a couple of dual port Mellanox MT25418's (Hardware v. a0 / 
firmware 2.6.0) to two FreeBSD 10.0-Stable amd64 boxes. I was hoping to use 
them as a cheap alternative to 10Gbps LAN cards for a point to point link 
to run HAST over.

I've remade/installed the world with OFED support - and compiled OFED, SDP, 
IPOIB_CM, ipoib, mlx4ib, mlxen and mthca in the kernel.

I've setup/run opensm - and the cards appear to be active OK - ibstat 
output seems OK, and ibportstate shows the cabled port is 'Active' / 
'LinkUp' and running at 5.0 Gbps using 4X (cards are only connected to each 
other).

I've put an IP on both ends - and can ping between the cards, but TCP/IP 
performance seems very poor - e.g. a test 'ftp' between the cards only nets 
around 381Kbyte/s? [iperf shows similarly poor results]

I can't see any errors logged anywhere - and 'netstat -b -i' doesn't show 
any errors either.

Anyone else running these cards successfully?

My opensm config consists of just 'PORTS="ALL"' - I was unable to find a 
lot of example opensm file configs.

Also I get some chatter dumped on the console (presumably from the drivers) 
most of it looks just like some kind of debug output [can't see any obvious 
errors].

fwiw both machines are 1230v3 Xeon based.

Can anyone suggest what might be wrong? / What to look at?

Thanks,

-Karl