eri conversion update

Hmm... it looks like I never posted the webrev... well here it is, the webrev for the eri(7d) conversion to Nemo.

Now, the second bit of good news here is that the PSARC case for this as been submitted as PSARC 2007/243. Note that the case isn't published publicly at the time of writing, but it should be soon.

afe and dmfe cases approved

FYI, the afe and dmfe cases I had at PSARC (2007/229 and 2007/221 respectively) were approved. I've already put back the dmfe code. The afe code will be committed by Alan DuBoff. I've got pre-approval to do a follow-up putback to convert afe to GLDv3 afterwards.

Note that as a result of Crossbow, there are some changes coming in GLDv3, so it is still inappropriate to use GLDv3 for unbundled drivers. (The biggest of these changes is support for "polling", where the network stack can disable interrupts on the NIC and run a separate thread to poll the device for inbound packets. On extremely high traffic systems, this can have a big impact on overall system throughput by avoiding the extra context switches.)

afe PSARC case number

The PSARC fasttrack to integrate afe into Nevada was assigned case number PSARC 2007/229. Notably, this case was not submitted by me (I'm not even on the interest list!), and is being done as a result of the BSD license terms for afe. It will probably be reviewed at next week's PSARC meeting.

Death to IEN-116

Finally, over 20 years since the late Jon Postel said Death To IEN-116, we have finally removed it from OpenSolaris. Who says changes in Solaris take too long?

eri tests look good.. call for more testers

As predicted, the area of biggest risk in my conversion of eri to GLDv3 was in fact the kstat handling. However, I appear to have that all worked out now, and the binary is working flawlessly on my SunBlade 100. Even suspend/resume works fine. However, I've not yet integrated this code properly into a workspace to generate a webrev, but I will do so soon. (Probably tomorrow... I'd like to get my two other RTIs put back first.)

One of the biggest concerns about this effort was the added risk that doing this conversion might bring to the "stable" eri driver. So, I'm asking the community for help. If you want to help out with testing, especially if you have higher end systems or want to do some benchmark comparisons, please let me know.

(I don't have specific test suites to give out that this time... its of more value frankly to have people using their own tests right now, that way we get broader test coverage than perhaps we might with a single test suite.)

Please let me know. Thanks! (Oh yeah, if you have an eri you want to try with new GLDv3-based 802.3ad link aggregation features, I'd be game for that, too!)

(PS. An obvious consequence of this effort is that it will be easy to do the work to convert hme, gem, and qfe, which share a lot common heritage with the eri driver. So, maybe there is yet hope for those, as well.)