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

[Jack Vogel]

On 6/5/07, Alan Amesbury <amesbury at umn.edu> wrote:
> Kip Macy wrote:
>
>
> >> 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.
>
> Er, probably from the conversation I was having in my head and failed to
> get into writing.  :-\  There are some other things which are important,
> e.g., having the drivers in 6.2-RELEASE, which I don't think I mentioned.
>
> >> 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.
>
> Andrew Gallatin was most helpful in providing some additional
> information off-list about the Myricom cards.  We don't run 6-STABLE, so
> the driver he backported to 6-STABLE hasn't shown up on our systems.  I
> rarely look at -CURRENT because--well, we don't use that in production.
>   To look at 6.2-RELEASE and earlier, Intel is the only 10Gb hardware
> that works with FreeBSD.  I'm glad to learn otherwise.  :-)
>
> > 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.
>
> You did, and thanks!  I'm still looking for alternatives, but am already
> focusing on Myricom and Chelsio products.  For our purposes, the Myricom
> hardware is looking more attractive than ixgb(4), as PCIe and support in
> 6-STABLE are extremely compelling.
>
> Thanks again for the help!

The ix or ixgbe driver (whichever it finally ends up being called) is currently
running on CURRENT or is that stably running on CURRENT :), however
I already have a customer requirement for STABLE so I plan to have
a version for both. When I started on the driver only CURRENT had
MSI/X so thats where I did development, but now we have it in
STABLE as well, its only TSO that is lacking and that should soon be
remedied as well.

Jack