Crapy Broadcom 5708 1G ethernet

The Broadcom devices tend to have lots of bugs. You need to know

*exactly* which "bug set" you need to support. Then, find a driver that knows how to handle those bugs.

YMwV

Yep, now I know. Just junk it.

If you're married to a particular OS (driver, etc.), then you're probably screwed -- or reliant upon someone else to "fix" the driver for your particular silicon. In my case, I just switched to another (BSD) OS that had better support for the hardware that I was using. Problem solved. I have no issues with any of the interfaces on these machines.

Of course, the actual devices in your box will dictate whose solution works best for you.

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Intel

thought

I usually avoid Broadcom whenever possible. Only binary drivers are availa ble, so nobody else can see or fix problems. The problem seems to appear w hen both interfaces are active; namely, only for firewall/gateway servers. These boxes were loaded with Intel and QLogic Fibre Channel adapters. I g uess they didn't care about the Broadcom problem before. Just wondering if we should go with more Intel or QLogic RJ45 adapters.

With the broadcom devices, there are *two* issues to deal with:

- the actual driver

- the device's firmware Drivers are usually fixable -- as the sources are available. OTOH, the firmware is another matter.

FWIW, I've had good success with FreeBSD and Broadcom. The same wasn't true about NetBSD (and the exact same devices). E.g., I recall NetBSD getting the interfaces "backwards" (swapped) in some places -- but not in others. This made it a real crap-shoot to try to configure each interface individually (as well as understanding to which *physical* interface a given set of messages pertained!)

Aparently the only 'good' Nic's are the Intel Pro series. Their the only ones that can saturate the connection reliably.

I think the latest consumer Intel Pro is the CT model.

Cheers

Intel bought quite a bit of their NIC IP from Digital Equipment Corp.

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ay

Just

Let's call this "firmware wrapper".

There was a timeout prior to losing the interface. Web search shows some i ssues regarding off-load checksum to the driver, rather than done by the TC P stack. The device is taking too long or not dealing with errors properly . However, there is no easy way to disable this features from the "wrapper ". Perhaps some versions of the firmware had this disabled.

Or it could be other problems. That's why i hate binary (firmware) drivers . In normal drivers, we can selectively enable/disable features, or at lea st see the options.

Yes, but it *does* have some functionality. "Wrapper" sort of dismisses that.

Exhausting the resources made available to it (e.g., mbufs)?

These devices are a lot smarter than "legacy" devices. Essentially, microcoded to embed functionality in the NIC instead of forcing it to be implemented in the driver/OS/stack. Unfortunately, I htink some of the implementation choices (hardware *or* firmware) may have been poorly thought out. "We know what the customer needs *better* than [s]he does!"

Try a FreeBSD LiveCD (-CURRENT is probably 10.something but the bce(4) driver goes back to 6.mumble. There are probably half a dozen controls that can be tweeked to influence its behavior.

I'd take the "crawl before walk" approach: configure the interfaces for lower data rates (e.g., 100BaseTX FDX) and verify it works reliably. Then, start enabling features (TSO, MSI, etc.) and boosting the interface speed(s) *with* a rich set of resources (i.e., the *most* you can configure). Eventually, throttle back on resources and see what tickles the bug.

Yup. At the very least, you can instrument or stub the code to see *why* (where) the problem manifests. And, from there, decide if its something that you can fix, the vendor must fix, etc.

Here ("office"), it's hard for me to come up with *any* use that even momentarily saturates the Gb links (file transfers, interactive traffic, X protocol, etc). I have a couple of servers "waiting in the wings" because I can't use the capabilities that they have available (in this case, dual 10Gb interfaces). Doubtful I'll ever use that fat of a pipe

*in* the house :-/ (hard to even make full use of 100M links)

Good luck!