Hi Darren, I'm from Solaris NIC team. Some questions you raise is also what I concerned before.
Darren Reed wrote: > Over time there has been an increase in the number > of features that NICs provide, to the point where > we are at now with some providing full TOEs. So far > there has been little in the way of knobs to turn > things on or off with, aside from do_hwcksum. > Currently TOEs such as HW checksum are toggled in the .conf file of drivers or /etc/system. /etc/system seems to be a more consistent interface since the name of TOEs in different drivers varies a lot. It's natural to think about a program to provide a unique interface of configurations such as dladm. And we already have Project Brussels. The actual barrier I notice is that GLD interface _m_getcapab() is not flexible. The driver can't update its TOEs capability interactively through _m_getcapab() at runtime (For e1000g LSO, it has practical usage). Only thing you can do after changing the configurations is to reboot the machine. So if we can have some changes in the stack, consolidating the configurations to _m_getprop(), it's better. > Something that might provide food for thought about > what sort of knobs we do need is how well those TOEs > play with other network components. For example, if > there is an interoperability problem with the TOE on > a NIC and some HBA, how do we manage that? How do we > disable use of the TOE on a card until a firmware > upgrade is available for it? > > And what sort of extra observability does that NIC > need in order to allow diagnosing problems with traffic > flow between it and the HBA? > If the issue can be isolated to the NIC only, we usually dump the NIC descriptors and the buffers with mdb to watch what's going on. But it requires knowledge about the specific NIC. Not sure what's the problem you meet. > If snoop and /dev/net are providing us with a view of > traffic that is between IP and the driver, how do we > get a look at what the NIC is really sending? > Well, without the help of special devices to observe the internal states of the NIC chip, you can still observe what the NIC is actually sending by monitoring the other end of the network. Sure, you should ensure that NIC on the other end is good in advance. Regards, Miles Xu > btw, the above comments about problems between a TOE > and HBA are not speculative in nature... > > Darren > > _______________________________________________ > networking-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
