Intel PRO/10GbE CX4? General 10Gb tips?

[Kip Macy]

On 6/4/07, Alan Amesbury <amesbury at umn.edu> wrote:
> On June 1, 2007, Kip Macy wrote:
>
> > I'm talking about what is in the tree in the moment. I'll have to
> > withhold judgement on ix until we can actually use it. With luck he'll
> > have time to adapt it to FreeBSD. There are a number of other 10GigE
> > drivers cards that are "supported" by FreeBSD, but they take the linux
> > shim approach and tend to be 3x slower.
>
> Sounds like the Intel hardware is the way to go, then.  Performance is

I'm not sure how you extrapolate that from the conversation to this
point. The ix cards are not currently available so nothing is yet
known about how they perform under FreeBSD and they may well come at a
premium for being dual-ported.


> absolutely key (else why spend the money for 10Gb hardware, right?), so
> a performance hit of more than 1-2% isn't going to be acceptable.  I'd
> be willing to consider vendors who provided native FreeBSD blobs but,
> where possible and feasible, I tend to give preference to those who
> release specs and driver source openly.

I'm sure ix will be open. mxge(4) and cxgb(4) are open.


> That said, if anyone knows of a 10Gb card that's a) FreeBSD friendly,
> and b) PCIe 8-lane (since I don't think PCI-X can't keep up with a
> saturated 10Gb link), I'd appreciate pointers.

I answered this question previously. The only 2 vendors with both good
cards and good drivers for FreeBSD at this time are Myricom and
Chelsio. Maybe we can poke Jack to post some numbers for ix(4) soon.

 -Kip