(Sorry for the cross-post, but I want to capture as many folks who might use this hardware as possible. If you don’t use or care about SPARC, you may delete this message. :-)
If you’re using a ce driver (aka Cassini) on SPARC (aka Sun Gigaswift ethernet), I’d like to know the following: a) Do you use this driver in a performance sensitive setting, or just for basic connectivity? b) Are you using this driver with Jumbo frames? c) Are you using fiber variations of this, or copper, or both? d) Are you using onboard NICs, or add-in PCI cards? I am working on a cassini rewrite, and I’d like to aim for a driver that is simpler, perhaps at the cost of some performance, but with some increased safety and simplification benefits. (For example, loan up and direct DMA binding pretty much makes no sense for ordinary MTUs. But if I don’t write the loan up code, it may penalize folks wanting to use jumbo frames.) I’m planning *not* to enable some of the more esoteric optimizations (header splitting, multiple receive rings — which were very limited in this hardware — and some of the more optimistic TCP “offloads”. (IP checksumming will still be enabled.) Essentially my hope is to just get the bare minimum to allow folks to continue to use onboard NICs, but perhaps at some costs of performance. I am not planning to add support for x86 either. Folks wanting to get better performance can get an add-in NIC. The reason for this work is to enable us to remove some complexity that is in the core IP stack that exists only for this driver. When Cassini is open source and a GLDv3 driver, it will receive certain other benefits from GLDv3 that may actually outweigh some of the losses, but more importantly it means that all the other NICs in illumos systems can stop paying a performance tax that only benefits Cassini. (Basically all the MT_MULTIDATA paths can be ripped out. As can a substantial portion of softmac, if there are no more pure DLPI NIC drivers.) Thanks. - Garrett ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
