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Date:      Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:26:27 +1000
From:      Antony Mawer <fbsd-questions@mawer.org>
To:        Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
Cc:        William <willay@gmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 6.0 compat with DL320 G4
Message-ID:  <44A4B603.1070403@mawer.org>
In-Reply-To: <002701c6969e$7b4ed180$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645>
References:  <a24358fb0605050239y1550f5d1o6bc461b4d3cc9472@mail.gmail.com>	<LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNAEOHFDAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com>	<a24358fb0606210116q3f019acdm40fb10224fd433b8@mail.gmail.com>	<000a01c69699$665c1030$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645>	<a24358fb0606230108r7e7a3fa3l4909cec6da8a2792@mail.gmail.com> <002701c6969e$7b4ed180$3c01a8c0@coolf89ea26645>

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On 23/06/2006 6:24 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> Out of the box the DL 320 G4 ships with a riser card that has 2 pci express
> slots.  At least that is what they are supposed to be, we haven't tried
> them.
...
> If you only do the pci express then the adapter you want is the Intel
> Pro 1000 PT  either the single port or the dual port, and make sure
> it is the "server adapter" not the "desktop adapter"  (the models carry
> the same model number but different descriptions, which is infuriating)

We ended up in this same situation, and went down the Intel PCI express 
NIC path (Intel Pro/1000PT). Be advised that, at this stage, the driver 
in both 6.0 and 6.1 -RELEASE does not support this card, but support is 
present in 7-CURRENT.

That being said, with the official Intel driver (v6.0.5, not sure if 
it's released yet), I was able to replace the standard em driver in 6.0, 
build a new kernel, and bring the server up and survive some 
pre-deployment load testing without any hiccups.

Be aware that while the riser card has two PCI Express slots, one is 
half-height, and the Intel NICs (at least the one we received) are a 
full card.

The onboard Broadcom NICs weren't worth the PCBs they were printed on in 
terms of stability -- we were seeing the same hard lockups as Ted and 
didn't have the luxury of time to spend fiddling with it!! From what I 
gather from Ted's previous investigations, there's various work-arounds 
in the Linux driver that work around some shortcomings in the hardware 
itself...

Regards
Antony



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