Current state of Intel XL710 40G NIC ixl performance

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> 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.

I would be interested in your sysctl values.

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org