Current state of Intel XL710 40G NIC ixl performance

[Muenz, Michael]

Am 28.03.2018 um 06:11 schrieb christian russell:
> I am having trouble getting an Intel XL710-DA2 NIC to get even close to
> line rate.  It is a 4x10 Gbps card.  The box is running FreeBSD 11 (FreeNAS
> in particular).
>
> We have tried both 1.7 and 1.9 driver revisions with similar results.  The
> NVM version is 5.05.  The card is in a confirmed 8x slot on a SuperMicro
> X10DRL-i with two Xeon E5-2600 processors and 256 GB DDR4 RAM.  After
> upping the interrupt threshold to 9000 dmesg doesn't log anything unusual.
>
> We have added the tunes that are standard for 10 Gbps configurations.
>
> On a single-client basis the fastest rates we see are around 5 Gbps.
> Hitting this server from multiple boxes we see peaks of 20 Gbps at the very
> highest.  More frequently things top off around 13 Gbps.  These numbers are
> coming from iperf tests.  We are seeing similar numbers with direct
> point-to-point as well as switched topologies.
>
> These threads from 2015 describe similar issues but fizzled out:
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2015-May/042273.html
> https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2015-October/043584.html
>
> Is there very particular tuning required to get these cards working at
> proper speed?  Any insights?
>
> >From Googling around it appears frustration with this card and FreeBSD is
> pretty common.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Christian

I can't deliver any special insights but we had many problems with X710 
(without L) and Linux.
Did some testing a while ago with OPNsense (based on 11.1) and got line 
rate with iperf and single client.
ixl0 in and ixl1 out. So this should be fine. If you like I can send you 
the sysctl values to compare.

Michael