Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 12:58:38 +0700 From: Yohanes Nugroho <yohanes@gmail.com> To: freebsd-arm@freebsd.org, freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD ARM network speed Message-ID: <260bb65e0910012258w7c569505xa8cac5bd8bbd2aaa@mail.gmail.com>
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Hi All, I am continuing my work on CNX11XX/STR91XX (more info about the work: http://tinyhack.com/2009/09/28/cnx11xxstr91xx-freebsd-progress/), two important things left are the Flash/CFI driver, and network problem. The Flash/CFI in theory should be easy, but I will read more about it to make sure that I will not mess the boot loader part. And now about the network. The network speed is now around half of Linux on the same hardware. FTP-ing from the device to my computer (uploading 30 mb file), the speed is about 1.6-2 megabyte/second (the high speed is on the second time when the data is already cached). On Linux, I can upload the same file with the speed of about 3-4 megabyte/second. Some info about the device: RAM: 64 Mb, CPU FA526 (ARM4, no thumb instruction), Speed 200Mhz. MAC is part of SoC, PHY is ICPLUS IP101A I have two question: 1. Is the network speed in Freebsd ARM currently slower than Linux ARM? If it is slower, then how much slower is it? I can not find a comparison of network speed on Freebsd arm and Linux ARM. I am interested if anyone can provide me the comparison between Linux and Freebsd on NSLU2 or some other device. Just for information, changing some kernel options in the Linux version (such as the scheduler used) makes the network speed varies greatly (i think the variation is more than 30%, so in certain configuration it can be a slow as the current FreeBSD version). The network in Linux 2.4 kernel is faster than Linux 2.6. 2. What should I do to make the network faster (especially the sending from device part, to make it usable as a media server)? Here are the things that I have done: - using the scatter/gather feature of the hardware (this improves the speed a little bit) - using checksum offloading feature of the hardware (this improves the speed a little bit) - using task_queue for sending (this improves the speed a lot) - I have disabled spinlock debugging, and other debugging except for the DDB - I have used the -O2 optimization flag - I have checked that there is no error/retransmission (using wireshark), so all the packets are sent and received correctly - I have disabled IPV6 (here is my current configuration: http://p4db.freebsd.org/fileViewer.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/str91xx/src/sys/arm/conf/CNS11XXNAS&REV=3) The specification for the STR9104 SoC is available on Cavium website for those who are interested, but it is not very clear, so in developing the network driver, I followed the logic used by the Linux driver (the initialization sequence, etc). The current code is at http://p4db.freebsd.org/fileViewer.cgi?FSPC=//depot/projects/str91xx/src/sys/arm/econa/if_ece.c&REV=4 Here is how the sending part works on STR9104: - In the initialization part, I allocate a ring, the size of the ring is 256 entries (same as Linux version). - When being asked to send a packet, I will do the following thing: - stop the network TX DMA - put the address of each segment of the packet to the ring, and set a flag so that the entry in the ring will be sent by hardware - start the network TX DMA obviously there is a cleaning up part (freeing mbuf) that should be done. The network driver can generate interrupt when a packet has been sent (but can't tell which entry was sent). In the Linux version, this interrupt is not used, the clean up is done just after starting the TX DMA, at the send of the sending function, and I do the same in the FreeBSD driver . Usually only one entry that needs to be removed, so it is quite fast. Is there something obvious (or not so obvius) that I've missed? -- Regards Yohanes http://yohan.es/
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