Broadcom BCE interface and polling (Dell 2950)

[Kirk Davis]

> Hi,
> 	We have just upgraded to a Dell 2950 for our main BGP router.
> With the constant rise in traffic through the box, I have started to
> notice some dropped packets so I figured I would take a look at
> putting the interfaces into polling more to squeeze a little more
> packets through them.
> 
> 	I have added the DEVICE_POLLING and HZ=1000 to the kernel.  I
> turned on polling for the bce interfaces and they pass traffic at low
> volumes (like ping tests).  If I put my fluke traffic generators on
> either side of the box and try to ramp it up to even 100Mb (they are
> Gig links) then the interfaces will stop responding.  Turning off
> polling will get them to respond again.
> 
> 	I know that the bce support in still quite new.  Has anyone else
> testing with polling and the bce interfaces?  Is there any more
> information that I can get for the developers to help track this down.
> The system is not in production right now so I can use it for testing.
> 
> 	As another note... I added some Intel (em) cards into the box
> and tested with them.  Polling worked great on them but I was only
> able to get about 200k packets per second before it starts dropping
> packets.  Is this about what I should expect?
> 
> [root@ ~]# uname -a
> FreeBSD  6.2-RC1 FreeBSD 6.2-RC1 #2: Tue Nov 28 18:10:56 MST 2006
> root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/INET-GW  i386
> 
> ---- Kirk
> 
>