Marvell 88E8052 PCI-E LAN on FreeBSD 7.0

[PYUN Yong-Hyeon]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 05:38:15AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
 > On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 11:33:34AM -0000, Graham Bentley wrote:
 > > 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!

I'm not sure you suffers from the same problem but there was a
Tx checksum offload related bug in msk(4) driver and it was fixed
in HEAD. How about applying the diff in CVS rev 1.33 of if_msk?
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/msk/if_msk.c.diff?r1=1.32;r2=1.33;f=h

 > 
 > Yong-Hyeon Pyun can probably explain what's going on here.  I've CC'd
 > him on this mail; he usually hangs out on -stable though.
 > 
 > You need to keep something in mind here: Marvell does not give out
 > documentation for their cards publicly, so Yong-Hyeon has to
 > reverse-engineer and "tinker" with what he already knows.  Some hardware
 > feature do not work, others are buggy, others work fine on specific
 > revisions of the chip while later ones break.
 > 
 > And if you tell me "Well Linux has support for this chip!", I will throw
 > the following evidence back in your face: Marvell and other companies
 > are giving Linux developers development PCI cards to develop drivers
 > with (sometimes even before the card is out in the market), so Linux has
 > the upper hand here.  They are not doing this with the BSDs.
 > 
 > Purely as an example: in my Wiki, section "Network devices", see the
 > entry for the 88E8040 NIC.  I'm still working with Yong-Hyeon to try to
 > get him access to a laptop that has this chip so he can write the
 > driver.
 > 
 > http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues
 > 
 > This should give you some idea of the complexities.  As I said, Linux
 > has the upper hand, because they're getting support from Marvell.
 > 
 > > 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?
 > 
 > I would urge you to go out and purchase an Intel Pro/1000 PT card, which
 > runs for around 30-40 USD.  It's good to have a spare NIC on hand
 > anyways -- your 3C509 xl(4) based NIC probably won't cut it, especially
 > if you're complaining about performance.  :-)  No one uses those cards
 > any more except individuals running on hardware from 1997, which you are
 > obviously not.
 > 
-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon