which 10GE cards are supported by FreeBSD ?

[Arnaud Lacombe]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 8:03 PM, Ben Hutchings
<bhutchings at solarflare.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-09-24 at 13:56 -0700, Juli Mallett wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 13:52, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it> wrote:
>> > apart from the typo ("know know") yes the email contained three
>> > serious questions, two of which (third party drivers and shops
>> > which carry the card) i cannot answer looking at the tree.
>> >
>> > On top of this, some in-tree drivers may be stale, broken, redundant
>> > (say ixgb vs ixgbe), and so on.  And not all hardware can do line
>> > rate -- not even at 1G, let alone 10G, so it would be good to know
>> > also some first hand information on performance.
>>
>> ixgb vs. ixgbe is not a stale/redundant issue.  ixgb only supports the
>> 82597, which you'll find is not supported by ixgbe.
>>
>> I think you'll have a hard time getting reliable performance
>> information.  There's a lot of smoke and mirrors about performance, as
>> you point out.  It has also been my experience that many 10g devices
>> cannot reliably do 1g line rate with minimal packet sizes.  I don't
>> fully understand why this is, but most people who I've seen give
>> performance numbers for FreeBSD are looking at bulk transmit, which is
>> of course not (necessarily) what you care about for netmap.  I've yet
>> to hear from anyone who can name a 10G NIC one can buy that can do
>> line rate with minimal packet sizes.  Solarflare boasts about lower
>> latency, so perhaps they'll have a better story in that area.
> [...]
>
> Sorry, our current hardware can't move 64-byte frames at 10G line rate.
> I can check what the maximum packet rate is if you're interested.
>
If you refer to [0] and [1], it would seem that the Solarstorm SFC4000
(B) supports 4e6 pps. That said, that is a number from 2008.

> We will have a FreeBSD driver out real soon now(TM), but most of my work
> on performance has gone into improving throughput.  (The latency should
> be pretty good if you turn off interrupt moderation, though.)  And
> really I think Onload is more useful than netmap, since it's compatible
> with existing source and binaries.
>
By "FreeBSD driver", do you mean just a driver for the card, or the
complete Onload stack ? AFAIS, it is currently Linux only.

Thanks,
 - Arnaud

[0]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y8hoznuuuM
[1]: http://www.openonload.org/openonload-google-talk.pdf
> Ben.
>
> --
> Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare
> Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
> They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.
>
>
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