Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:41:48 -0600 (CST) From: Kyle Mestery <mestery@winternet.com> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Call for testers for RealTek 8139 driver Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.05.9811301634590.6255-100000@tundra.winternet.com> In-Reply-To: <199809232033.QAA29223@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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Greetings, I am using the Realtek driver mentioned below, and am noticing some weird problems with it. First, some information about my setup. I have three machines on 10/100 hub: a hp apoll/300 running NetBSD operating at 10Mbps, a dual Pentium machine running FreeBSD-3.0 as of today with the ed driver running at 10Mbps, and a dual PPro machine running FreeBSD-3.0 as of today with the Realtek chip as follows: rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> rev 0x10 int a irq 19 on pci0.15.0 rl0: Ethernet address: 00:e0:7d:01:a5:05 rl0: autoneg complete, link status good (unknown mode! forcing half-duplex, 10Mbps) I am seeing something weird. When transfering large files, I can routinely get about 1000 KB/s between the two FreeBSD boxes. But, the collision light on my hub flashes a lot, which surprised me, since the only traffic on the hub was between the two FreeBSD boxes. So, I did a netstat -i on both boxes, and noticed the box with the ed driver had 1000's of collisions, while the box with the rl driver had maybe 800 (this was after about 20 trys of both copying the file across and using NFS). The reason I suspect the rl driver vs. the ed driver is the box with the rl driver used to have an ed driver, and I would barely see 100 collisions for every couple million packets. Has anyone else seen anything like this? FYI, the same effect can be seen when I comment out "#define RL_USEIOSPACE" in /sys/pci/if_rl.c. I am currently running with it commented out (I know it's not supposed to work with SMP, but I havent seen any problems yet, and the comments in the code lead me to believe running with that commented out will improve performace.) -- Kyle Mestery StorageTek's Storage Networking Group On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Bill Paul wrote: > This is a call for testers for yet another PCI fast ethernet device > driver, this time for the RealTek 8129 and 8139 chips. Note: I only > have an 8139 adapter so I can't tell for sure if the 8129 support > really works. The only major difference is that the 8129 uses an > external PHY and needs MDIO support whereas the 8139 has a transceiver > built in and the registers can be read directly. > > The source code is available from the following location: > > http://www.freebsd.org/~wpaul/RealTek/3.0 source for FreeBSD 3.0 > http://www.freebsd.org/~wpaul/RealTek/2.2 source for FreeBSD 2.2.x > > To add the driver to an existing system, do the following: > > - Copy if_rl.c and if_rlreg.h to /sys/pci > > - Edit /sys/conf/files and add a line that says: > > pci/if_rl.c optional rl device-driver > > - Edit your kernel config file (e.g. /sys/i386/conf/GENERIC) and add > a line that says: > > device rl0 > > - Compile a new kernel and reboot. > > You should get something like the following: > > rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> rev 0x10 int a irq 14 on pci2.10.0 > rl0: Ethernet address: 00:40:c7:79:18:1c > rl0: autoneg complete, link status good (full-duplex, 100Mbps) > > My test machine is a PII 400Mhz system; on this system I can easily > get 11MB/s transfer rates at 100Mbps full-duplex. Since the driver has > to perform buffer copies, performance may not be quite as good on slower > systems. Also, the autonegotiation on this chip seems a little flaky: > you may have to force the proper mode using ifconfig in order to set > it correctly for your network. > > As usual, report problems or success reports to > wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu. > > For those who are wondering, no, this driver will not make it into > FreeBSD 3.0-RELEASE: 3.0 is in a feature freeze and we have enough > new code to whack into shape before the ship date. > > Next on the hit parade: the Winbond W89C840F chip. > > -- > ============================================================================= > -Bill Paul (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu > Work: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research > Home: wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City > ============================================================================= > "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness" > ============================================================================= > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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