Do you use IDN? (E10K inter-domain networking)

I was looking, and one of the legacy device drivers we still support is the Enterprise 10000 Inter-Domain Network. This is a memory based interconnect network that emulates an ethernet.

It occurs to me that we could update this driver to use the GLDv3, which would potentially have a significant performance boost for it. (Really, a better solution would be to create a new low level MAC type for it Nemo, but clearly that's probably too much pain for a product that is no longer shipping).

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear of any sites which use IDN on E10K class systems, and would like to see this (already high performance) network get another boost.

The other legacy SPARC drivers which are not GLDv3 compliant are:

  • cassini (ce) (probably never going to be GLDv3, but that's another matter)
  • gem (ge) -- this one could be easily converted *if* I had fiber cards to test it with, although there are political concerns as well. (It uses the same MAC controller as "eri", which I converted a while back.)
  • scman -- This is used for the Starcat (E15K/25K) connection between the SC and domains. It is also based on the eri driver, but has some special hacks. I'm a bit paranoid about touching this one, but if someone really wants it to be GLDv3, please let me know. (This isn't supposed to be a high performance network!)
I'm not aware of any other non-GLDv3 device drivers remaining for SPARC, but if you know of any, 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