problem with Marwell gigabit performance

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 11:48:14AM +0100, OxY wrote:
 > hi!
 > 
 > i have a Marwell (SMC) gigabit ethernet card (sk0) and 
 > have serious problems with performance..
 > the machine is a pc, amd 2000+ xp, 512mb ram.
 > 
 > tested with iperf (bidirectional test, udp transfer, not stream)
 > and got 8-15% packet drop when the system was idle.
 > 

There is a modified sk(4) driver at
http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/sk/sk_test/if_sk.c
http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/sk/sk_test/if_skreg.h

Would you please give it try?
I can't sure but you would get better results as the new driver
uses one lock for standard MTU size and supports Tx TCP checksum
offload and Rx IP checksum offload.
I could push 32bit PCI NIC(DGE-530T) to the PCI bus limit on sparc64.

 > then tuned the sysctl with these settings:
 > 
 > kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=81920000
 > kern.ipc.nmbclusters=5000000000
 > kern.ipc.somaxconn=8192
 > net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=1
 > net.inet.raw.recvspace=4096
 > net.inet.tcp.recvspace=131072
 > kern.ipc.shmmax=409600000
 > 
 > with these i got around 3-7% packet drop,
 > but it's very high compared to zero :)
 > 
 > my question is where/what should i optimize to not
 > have packet drop at all, or at least reduce it as much as
 > possible.
 > 
 > thanks for your help!
 > 
 > Csaba Banhalmi, HU                            
-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon