Re: SKGE backport to 2.4 : success

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

Hi Stephen,

I don't know if you received my mail since I got no reply.

Thanks in advance for your comments,
Willy

On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 10:57:07PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> 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
>