So, I was bumming around on a Dell PE860 that is running s10u4 + u5 KU and was looking at a way to eek some more performance out of its on- board bge-based NICs, which are ran by BCM5721 "J" rev chips. My attention turned towards the hardware tx/rx rings.
According to some sources[1] I found while googling around, this particular BCM model supports 4 tx and 4 rx rings, so I went about to see if all 4 of each were in use. From what I've seen, the answer is "perhaps not", and that's what brings me here. It appears from the tail-end of /platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/bge.conf that only 1 rx and 1 tx ring is enabled by default. Digging through the bge driver source code, the BCM5721 chipset's rings config is defined as BGE_RECV_RINGS_MAX_5705... which amounts to 1. Am I missing something in understanding things, or if the chipset's docs say "4 rx and 4 tx rings" would it be safe to override the bge default of 1? Could the bge code itself be mistakenly setting the number of rings lower than it should be on some chipsets, such as this one? TIA for any hints. /dale [1] http://manuals.fujitsu-siemens.com/serverbooks/content/manuals/html/broadcom/netxtreme_57xx/features.htm _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
