From owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 30 09:24:15 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93B6716A41F for ; Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:24:15 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from andre@freebsd.org) Received: from c00l3r.networx.ch (c00l3r.networx.ch [62.48.2.2]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5820443D8C for ; Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:24:09 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from andre@freebsd.org) Received: (qmail 58605 invoked from network); 30 Nov 2005 09:22:08 -0000 Received: from c00l3r.networx.ch (HELO freebsd.org) ([62.48.2.2]) (envelope-sender ) by c00l3r.networx.ch (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP for ; 30 Nov 2005 09:22:08 -0000 Message-ID: <438D6FB9.FFBD8593@freebsd.org> Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:24:09 +0100 From: Andre Oppermann X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.8 [en] (Windows NT 5.0; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jack Vogel References: <2a41acea0511300052o2dfe841bj8834a07720bebb6a@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org, scottl@freebsd.org, yongari@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hey everyone X-BeenThere: freebsd-net@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Networking and TCP/IP with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 09:24:15 -0000 Jack Vogel wrote: Dear Jack, > I wanted to introduce myself to the list. I am now the primary contact > at Intel for our drivers. There was some earlier email I saw in the archive > about 82571/2 support, and I want to confirm that that code is coming. for a too long time Intel has abandoned their direct involvement in the FreeBSD 'em' driver. And you have two people with direct commit rights to the FreeBSD CVS tree. In the meantime we have taken the driver maintainance into our own hands, have rewritten parts of it and got a lot more conforming code. Not to mention that we were able to increase the performance significantly too. We have fixed many show-stopper bugs which were wedging the hardware as well. Before you continue development on your own FreeBSD driver please have a very close look the version we have in our CVS tree. You may benefit from taking that as base and continue development from it instead of your own code. The CVS commit messages explain in much detail which problems we found and how we solved them. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/em/if_em.c Intel would help us a lot if you would release the Erratas to your 'em' chip famility. > I hope to be adding some new feature support as well. I have been > eyeing TSO which is going to need stack changes, if anyone out there > has been working or just thinking about that get in touch with me about it. We have already looked into TSO a bit and so far the result is inconclusive. We may not want to make any large changes to the TCP code to faciliate any particular TSO architecture. To make the case in favor of supporting TSO it has to be shown that is provides real-world benefits and extensive benchmark results have to be provided. Any changes to our TCP code to support TSO must be well designed and be generic supporting other vendors TSO as well. However I must say that a really compelling has to be made for TSO to justify the changes and the associated long term code maintainance hurdles with it. Please have a look at this paper discussing TSO among other things: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/Optimizing%20the%20FreeBSD%20IP%20and%20TCP%20Stack.pdf > In any case, I am kept quite busy but I will make every effort to be here > and be as responsive as i can. Please get in contact with Gelb Smirnoff , Pyun YongHyeon and Scott Long . Those folks have assumed maintainership of the 'em' driver and contributed many important fixes and performance enhancements. For the time being I guess it is the best if we collect the direct CVS access of pdeuskar and tackerman and you submit patches to 'em' through one of the above contacts at FreeBSD. -- Andre