FreeBSD 6.0 compat with DL320 G4

[Antony Mawer]

On 23/06/2006 6:24 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Out of the box the DL 320 G4 ships with a riser card that has 2 pci express
> slots.  At least that is what they are supposed to be, we haven't tried
> them.
...
> If you only do the pci express then the adapter you want is the Intel
> Pro 1000 PT  either the single port or the dual port, and make sure
> it is the "server adapter" not the "desktop adapter"  (the models carry
> the same model number but different descriptions, which is infuriating)

We ended up in this same situation, and went down the Intel PCI express 
NIC path (Intel Pro/1000PT). Be advised that, at this stage, the driver 
in both 6.0 and 6.1 -RELEASE does not support this card, but support is 
present in 7-CURRENT.

That being said, with the official Intel driver (v6.0.5, not sure if 
it's released yet), I was able to replace the standard em driver in 6.0, 
build a new kernel, and bring the server up and survive some 
pre-deployment load testing without any hiccups.

Be aware that while the riser card has two PCI Express slots, one is 
half-height, and the Intel NICs (at least the one we received) are a 
full card.

The onboard Broadcom NICs weren't worth the PCBs they were printed on in 
terms of stability -- we were seeing the same hard lockups as Ted and 
didn't have the luxury of time to spend fiddling with it!! From what I 
gather from Ted's previous investigations, there's various work-arounds 
in the Linux driver that work around some shortcomings in the hardware 
itself...

Regards
Antony