Re: [PATCH] nve(4) locking cleanup

I have a pair of DFI Nforce-4 based "NF4 ultra" boards, where the
FreeBSD driver will never pass any traffic at all (and never has).

Matthew Dillon writes:
 >     At this point I believe that the remaining problems are entirely within
 >     Nvidia's nvnet object module.  I don't think there is anything we can do
 >     about it short of NVidia coming out with an update (which isn't likely).

At least on my boards, the Solaris "nfo" driver from
http://homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng works flawlessly.
The object file they use has the same checksum as the one used
by the FreeBSD driver.

Note that this is at 100Mb/s speeds, and is used for NFS (client),
and ssh sessions only.  I haven't tried really hard to beat the
snot out of it, but it has worked for months without me seeing
a problem in daily use.

 >     Now, linux *has* a native implementation of this driver that does not
 >     use the Nvidia module, and I have gotten reports that it does not suffer
 >     from the same problems. 

I'm working on a linux driver right now, and have enabled the the
linux slab debugging stuff (similar to the type of malloc debugging we
get with INVARIANTS).  At boot (before I even load my driver), the
forcedeth driver from 2.6.13.1 will receive corrupted frames.  Anybody
porting that driver should look out for buffer over/under flow issues
in it...

Drew