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Date:      Sat, 20 Mar 1999 00:04:22 -0800
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
Cc:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>, Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Gigabit ethernet revisited 
Message-ID:  <199903200804.AAA12975@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 19 Mar 1999 22:06:35 PST." <199903200606.WAA38098@rah.star-gate.com> 

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>I think that David Greeman quoted 2 gigabytes/sec memory bandwith for 
>the Xeon processor with whatever  chipset he was using. 

   That was Intel's claim when using 8-way interleaved, 50ns EDO memory (which
is how this machine is configured). I think whoever said that at Intel was
wrong, however. It doesn't seem to be as fast as even 1 GB/second. I'm
actually getting lower transmit numbers than Bill is for the equivilent tests,
on a machine that should be much faster than Bill's, and that's another
mystery we've been trying to resolve.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project

>
>	Cheers,
>	Amancio
>
>> :Bill Paul wrote:
>> :>
>> :> The receiving host is under heavy interrupt load. Andrew Gallatin has
>> :> said to me that this is a classic case of livelock, where the system
>> :> is so busy processing interrupts that nothing else is getting done.
>> :> In this case, the NIC is dutifully DMAing all the packets to the host
>> :> and the driver is queing them all to ether_input(), but this is happening
>> :...
>> :
>> :I think Andrew might be right..
>> :it could well be livelock.
>> :
>> :Matt Thomas implemented a solution for the 100mb dec cards
>> :when 100 was fast. I think that the de drivers responded to the
>> :interrupt and immediatly did SCHEDNETISR() to schedule the rest of
>> 
>>     Hey cool, at least the hardware problem has been solved!
>> 
>>     On the livelock thingy -- well, one way to find out is to use ipfw
>>     to throw away the packets, and then do a 'systat -vm 1' to see where
>>     the cpu's time is being sent and how much cpu is being used.
>> 
>>     I'm guessing between 50% and 70% of the cpu is being eaten with the
>>     packets going into an ipfw bitbucket.
>> 
>>     Each memory read or write represents around 85 MBytes/sec.  The DMA counts
>>     as one.  The read() system call counts as two ( because it must read from
>>     one memory location and write to another ) -- this puts us perilously
>>     close to the memory bandwidth limit of the cpu when you count all the
>>     other garbage going on that's breaking up the L1 cache.
>> 
>> :julian
>> 
>> 					-Matt
>> 					Matthew Dillon 
>> 					<dillon@backplane.com>
>> 
>> 
>> 
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