Status of the sk driver/NIC (was: Re: if_sk patch to get more info from people with problems)

[Sean Chittenden]

> I was talking about your small patch. FreeBSD 5.3RC2-amd64 was working 
> fine for some 18 h even with SMP compiled kernel until I have tried 
> file copying over  NFS (using linux 2.6.9 as NFS client). Performance 
> was poor and after incomplite copy of single file system rebooted with 
> panic. It was also strange that copying  of 700mb  took some 30 min. 
> on 100Mbit/s FD. After that I have applied  small two lines patch, 
> recompiled kernel and although I have coppied something like 100Gb of  
> different mp3 and avi files over NFS - so far everything seems  ok. I 
> haven't compiled kernel with options WITNESS but it was my  intention 
> and will do so if I experience any further (if any) sk driver caused 
> suspected crashes.

Can someone authoritatively give me a quick answer regarding this?

*) Is the sk driver not working/not working properly?

*) Is the sk driver making up for deficiencies in the hardware?

*) Will the sk driver be able to make up for the deficiencies in the 
hardware such that sk will perform well enough for most uses (under no 
pretenses that it will perform as well as an em nic/driver)?

Sorry, I've been following this for a while.  I have a few machines 
with an sk on the famous K8V SE Deluxe, but am exclusively using em0 
instead of sk0.  At some point I'd like to turn up the sk0 NIC and use 
OSPF to multipath traffic... but that's all predicated on the sk0 not 
sucking too much (sk can be slow, just can't cause the machine to 
crash).   -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden