Marvell 88E8052 PCI-E LAN on FreeBSD 7.0

[Graham Bentley]

Hi ALl,

I have a DFI LanParty Mobo that includes Marvells 88E8052
and 88E8053 LAN IF.

Using the module with 7.0 [msk] the network preformance
is terrible, Opera / Links stall, or wont page load at
all although pings to the router are fine?

I then tried using Marvells own driver the website [myk]
and the results where about the same.

Just before I was about to give up and put in my trusty
old 3Com 3C509 [xl] I noticed that in the Marvell doco
there where several tunable params so decided to try
out a few.

I discovered that adding -txcsum and -rxcsum (i.e.
disabling hardware checksuming) to the ifconfig
statement, the performance was as quick as it is
on that other OS!

It seems that hw cs is on by default so I added the
above to my ifoncfig line in /etc/rc.conf and now
all is snappy!

I was wondering how could this be the case and also
if anyone else had this issue with Marvell chips?