afe and mxfe status notes

For those of you that care, I think we're in the home stretch for integration of afe and mxfe into Nevada.

I spent the weekend going through the code, and reworking large portions of it to make use of zero-copy DMA wherever it was rational to do so (loan up for receive, direct binding for transmit).

The NICDRV test suite has also identified a number of issues with edge cases that didn't come up often, but which I'm glad to know about and have fixed in the version of the code getting putback.

They're only 100 Mbps nics, but the version of the code going into Nevada will make them run at pretty much the same speed as any other 100 Mbps NIC without IP checksum offload.

And, they are still 100% DDI compliant. :-) Thankfully the DDI has been extended for OpenSolaris since the last time I worried about such things (back in Solaris 8 days).

Anyway, looking forward to putback in b70 or b71. (Depending on whether I can get reviewers in time for b70 putback. If you can help me review, please let me know!)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SP (nanomsg) in Pure Go

I'm pleased to announce that this past weekend I released the first version of my implementation of the SP (scalability protocols, sometimes known by their reference implementation, nanomsg ) implemented in pure Go . This allows them to be used even on platforms where cgo is not present.  It may be possible to use them in playground (I've not tried yet!) This is released under an Apache 2.0 license .  (It would be even more liberal BSD or MIT, except I want to offer -- and demand -- patent protection to and from my users.) I've been super excited about Go lately.  And having spent some time with ØMQ in a previous project, I was keen to try doing some things in the successor nanomsg project.   (nanomsg is a single library message queue and communications library.) Martin (creator of ØMQ ) has written rather extensively about how he wishes he had written it in C instead of C++.  And with nanomsg, that is exactly what he is done. And C is a great choice for implement
Read more

An important milestone

Yesterday, with very little fanfare, illumos passed an important milestone. This milestone was the integration of  195 Need replacement for nfs/lockd+klm This is work that I originally tasked Gordon Ross and Dan Kruchinin to work while we were colleagues at  Nexenta .  Gordon started the work, picking up bits from FreeBSD as a starting point and gluing it to the illumos entry points.  Dan continued with it, and fleshed out a lot of the skeleton that Gordon had started.  It was subsequently picked up by the engineers at Delphix , and -- after some important bug fixing work was completed -- was integrated into their product quite some time ago -- reportedly its been stable since December in their product. The reason this is such an important milestone, is two fold: First, this represents a substantial collaborative effort, involving contributions from parties across several organizational boundaries.  The level of collaboration achieved here is a win for the greater good of th
Read more

The Hand May Be Forced

Well, as you may have read , Oracle has decided that at some point very soon, we're going to lose normal regular access to the source code for OS/Net. (I.e. the Solaris kernel and supporting programs.) While I would have vastly preferred for Illumos to have a cooperative and collaborative relationship with Oracle , it appears that Oracle doesn't value this. In fact, the exact words were from the management at Oracle were as follows: Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. While I understand the need to own the technology, there are few things that could be stated that show a stronger NIH attitude than this. Its unlikely that there will ever be a way for Oracle and the greater community to have a collaborative relationship. This is a dark day for OpenSolaris -- its effectively dead now. (Its parent, Solaris, lives on however.) How unfortunate. For Oracle that is. Because
Read more