major bge(4) performance problem

[Laurent Frigault]

Hi,

We are experiencing a problem with BCM5721 bge interfaces, which seems to
be able to receive at almost 1Gbps but can only transmit at < 540Mbps.

It is the exactly same problem describes at
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2007-June/014373.html

Our test server is as Dell PE860
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X3220  @ 2.40GHz (2400.10-MHz K8-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6fb  Stepping = 11
  Features=0xbfebfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0xe3bd<SSE3,RSVD2,MON,DS_CPL,VMX,EST,TM2,SSSE3,CX16,xTPR,PDCM>
  AMD Features=0x20100800<SYSCALL,NX,LM>
  AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>
  Cores per package: 4
usable memory = 8577101824 (8179 MB)
avail memory  = 8297656320 (7913 MB)

bge0 at pci0:4:0:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x01e61028 chip=0x165914e4 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Corporation'
    device     = 'BCM5721 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
bge1 at pci0:5:0:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x01e61028 chip=0x165914e4 rev=0x11 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Corporation'
    device     = 'BCM5721 NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet


We ran the following test with FreeBSD 6.3-PRERELEASE/i386 , FreeBSD
7.0BETA4/amd64 (ULE and BSD,  with and without POLLING).

# dd if=/dev/zero bs=1m count=102400 | nc peer 15000

no firewall on the server.
netstat -i show no errors 

interface forced 1000baseTX duplex-full on both server and switch, no autoneg.

The server as 2  bge interfaces, and both have the same problem.

Peer was running 6.3-PRERELEASE/amd64 with an em interface
on peer we run :
nc -l 15000 >/dev/null

If we boot our test server with a linux ubuntu 6.0.6 and run the same test, we
can transmit at more than 900 Mbps so it is not an harware problem. But
we would like to stay away from linux on our servers.

Is there any patch/fix available for this driver ?

Unfortunatly our server has no more slot available so we can't forget the bge
interfaces and add an em interface.

I can run tests on a spare server if needed (same hardware).

Regards,
-- 
Laurent Frigault | <url:http://www.agneau.org/>
"Ask not what Windows 2000 can do for you, ask what you can do for
Windows 2000."
- John F. Kennedy, after submitting his first bug report.