Alteon ACEnic card

[He Ding]

Has anybody done some OS kernel modification or NIC driver modification
of Gigabit Ethernet Card on Linux to reduce CPU utilization?

I know Duke has done some similar work on FreeBSD for Alteon card.

Eric He 
PhD student
Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Chicago 
(312) 996-3002



On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Val Henson wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 10:38:44AM -0500, Gary Stiehr wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 	We are looking at Alteon's ACEnic card for use in our cluster.  I was
> > wondering what people's experiences have been with the performance of
> > Alteon ACEnic cards.  Which switches do you use with the cards?  Do you
> > take advantage of the "jumbo frames?"  Any information would be helpful.
> 
> I'm not using the acenic in a cluster environment, in fact, I'm only
> using it in back-to-back configurations.  My experience with it has
> been mostly good.  It does take at least two processors to drive this
> card at any reasonable speed.
> 
> I'm using them primarily in jumbo frame mode (9000 byte MTU).  The
> Linux acenic driver has a bug that will oops the machine if you change
> the mtu too many times.  I sent Jes Sorensen a rudimentary patch but
> as of version 0.46 he hasn't integrated it.
> 
> My measured bandwidth on two-cpu machines running Linux 2.2.16, with
> default tuning and 9000 byte MTU, tops out at 615 Mbps.  I'm sure this
> could be increased with a little bit of work.
> 
> The Alteon AceNIC's are the most expensive Gigabit Ethernet cards by
> far, so we're buying some of the cheaper versions for evaluation.  For
> some unofficial gige NIC prices, see:
> 
> http://www.tdl.com/~netex/network/network.html
> 
> Unfortunately, no one seems to have them in stock at the moment...
> 
> -VAL
> 
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