which 10GE cards are supported by FreeBSD ?

[Ben Hutchings]

On Sun, 2011-09-25 at 21:31 -0400, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
> 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.

The current SFC9020/SFL9021 products should be the same in this regard.

> > 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.
[...]

It's a standard kernel net driver.  Currently there is no work on Onload
for FreeBSD.

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.