Question about bce driver

[Paul Schmehl]

--On July 11, 2007 1:51:04 PM -0500 Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> wrote:
>
> I was running the driver from STABLE until about March and it would
> bounce the link up and down a couple times a day even under
> relatively moderate load. (50-60 mbps)  So perhaps there have been
> improvements since then, but I gave up dealing with it.  The driver
> was utterly broken in 6.1-R (0.9.5), by the time 6.2-R was getting
> rolled the driver in STABLE would at least not tip over under TCP
> load, but it was trivial to wedge it with even moderate amounts of
> UDP.
>
> I eventually reached the conclusion (correct or not) that you can't
> fix crap hardware with a driver.

No offense, but I think that's the incorrect conclusion.  It pains me to 
say it, but we have never had a single problem with the Broadcomms on 
Windows servers, and we have a boatload of them (at least 100).  That 
seems to point to the driver being the source of the problem, not the 
hardware.  Furthermore, when I first got the 1950, the NIC was completely 
unusable.  It would lock up hard and require a reboot to function again. 
That problem was fixed in the next iteration of the driver, and, except 
for the link state problem, the NIC has functioned normally ever since. 
(I don't use jumbo frames.)

ISTM the driver is the source of all the problems associated with the 
card(s).  I wish I knew enough to work on driver code, but I do not.  I 
noticed that the guy writing the driver for FreeBSD works for Broadcomm. 
Perhaps he could comment?

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/