amd64/108861: [nve] nve(4) driver on FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64 does not work at 1Gbps with nForce4 NIC

[Lawrence Stewart]

The following reply was made to PR amd64/108861; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Lawrence Stewart <lstewart at room52.net>
To: Angelo Turetta <aturetta+bsd at bestunion.it>
Cc: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: amd64/108861: [nve] nve(4) driver on FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64 does 
     not work at 1Gbps with nForce4 NIC
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:56:21 +1100

 Hi Angelo,
 
 Thanks very much for the reply.
 
 Angelo Turetta wrote:
 > Could you please test the alternative driver mentioned at
 >
 > http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shigeaki/software/freebsd-nfe.html
 >
 > It's already been commited to -current, and I'd certainly hope it will be
 > MFC to 6-STABLE soon.
 >
 > Angelo Turetta
 >   
 
 
 The new driver appears to be working perfectly. I'm running it through 
 some basic stress tests now, but everything so far is all good. It can 
 sync at both 100baseTX and 1000baseTX. When in 100baseTX mode, I can get 
 11.1 Mb/sec over scp. When in 1000baseTX I can get 24 MB/sec over scp. 
 This was only transferring from a low spec desktop machine, so I think 
 the machine's disk drive was the bottleneck, not the NIC.
 
 For the benefit of anyone else that comes across this thread and wants 
 to know how to get the new driver working, here are the steps I followed 
 (lines beginning with a hyphen "-" are comments, not actual shell commands):
 
 
 
 cd /root
 
 fetch http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shigeaki/software/nfe-20070106.tar.gz
 
 
 - You may need a different patch to the one below depending on the 
 motherboard you have... this patch is the right one for my Asus A8N-E, 
 but all the details are on the patch website 
 http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shigeaki/software/freebsd-nfe.html
 
 fetch 
 http://www.se.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~shigeaki/software/e1000phy.20061219.fbsd62.patch
 
 tar -xzvf nfe-20070106.tar.gz
 
 cp -r nfe-20070106 /usr/src/sys/dev/nfe
 
 cp e1000phy.20061219.fbsd62.patch /usr/src/sys/dev/mii/
 
 cd /usr/src/sys/dev/mii/
 
 patch < e1000phy.20061219.fbsd62.patch
 
 cd /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/
 
 - Not sure that you need to do the next step, but I thought it would be 
 safer to remove the nve(4) driver from the kernel so it didn't get 
 confused... you can still kldload it later if needed
 
 edit GENERIC
 
 - Comment out the line "device          nve             # nVidia nForce 
 MCP on-board Ethernet Networking"
 
 
 
 rm -rf ../compile/GENERIC
 
 config GENERIC
 
 cd ../compile/GENERIC
 
 make cleandepend && make depend && make && make install
 
 cd /usr/src/sys/dev/nfe
 
 make
 
 make install
 
 shutdown -r now
 
 
 - You should now have if_nve.ko in /boot/kernel/ and you can kldload it 
 using "kldload if_nfe" or load it at startup by sticking 
 if_nfe_load="YES" in /boot/loader.conf.
 
 - Good times from here on in!
 
 
 
 
 Thanks again for the help.
 
 
 Regards,
 Lawrence Stewart