Dear All, As you know we have two drivers, nve(4) and nfe(4), in tree to serve nVidia network adapters. nve(4) was the first driver for nVidia network adapters and it relied on binary code(nvenetlib.o) from vendor to access the hardware. Using the binary code revealed several issues and David E. O'Brien imported FreeBSD nfe(4) which was ported by Shigeaki Tagashira from OpenBSD nfe(4). The nfe(4) was very promising as it has full source code and supported lots of newer nVidia hardwares. With bus_dma(9) changes I could even get netperf performance report for the first time which was never possible on nve(4).(It always panicked my box while the test was in progress and it's still true on CURRENT). Shigeaki Tagashira and I had been working on enhancing nfe(4) for several months. Now I think we'got stable working nfe(4) and it's time to supesede nve(4) with the overhauled nfe(4) before branching to 7. We fixed serveral bus_dma(9) bugs in the driver and added new hardware capabilities such as MSI/MSIX, hardware VLAN support and TSO. The only drawback of the overhauled nfe(4) I'm aware is lack of manual half-duplex media configuration. Autosensing the media works but some hardwares including mine does not work at all with manual half-duplex media configuration. Other than that it should work better than nve(4). I had mailed several times to David E. O'Brien to get his comments but I still didn't receive a reply. I'd like to commit the overhauled nfe(4) and make the nfe(4) default drivers for 6-STABLE/7. If there is objection please let me know. The overhauled nfe(4) can be found at the following URL. http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfe.c http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfereg.h http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/if_nfevar.h If you are brave enough to test Rx lock-free nfe(4), try: http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/WIP/if_nfe.c http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/WIP/if_nfereg.h http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/nfe/WIP/if_nfevar.h Thanks. -- Regards, Pyun YongHyeonReceived on Sat Jun 02 2007 - 06:42:17 UTC
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