From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Willy Tarreau Subject: SKGE backport to 2.4 : success Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 22:57:07 +0200 Message-ID: <20061028205707.GA722@1wt.eu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: David Miller , Jeff Garzik , netdev@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from 1wt.eu ([62.212.114.60]:20996 "EHLO 1wt.eu") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751414AbWJ1U5a (ORCPT ); Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:57:30 -0400 To: Stephen Hemminger Content-Disposition: inline Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Hi Stephen, In my own kernels, I've added your backport of SKGE to 2.4 that I found here : http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/releases/skge-sky2-backport.tar.bz2 It seems to work pretty well compared to the original syskonnect driver (up to and including 8.36). Several people around me have reported very slow NFS operations with the official driver, which I finally attributed to a strange effect of UDP packets not going out after a while until they get "pushed" by a TCP packet. I even noticed the problem at the company and we turned the NFS server to an unused 100 Mbps card to workaround the problem before being able to fully ananlyze the problem. It seems your driver is getting mature and its performance is very close to the official one, while its code is smaller and apparently more reliable. I was thinking about merging it in mainline 2.4 as a fix for people having trouble with the syskonnect driver. It might also be easier to backport fixes from 2.6 to 2.4 when the driver is the same. I don't think we risk any regression because it won't replace an existing driver, but will provide one to people who are used to download new versions from an external tree. Also, I'm not yet sure whether I would also backport the sky2 driver, because I know about a handful boxes running in production with the official one with 88E8053 chips at high packet rates with no trouble at all. Anyway, as long as the backport does not prevent them from using the external driver, there should be no problem. I'd like to get your opinion on this matter, and of course, Jeff's and Davem's. Thanks in advance, Willy