Anyone can share the Network card experience

Tue Oct 5 15:02:47 UTC 2010

>> Anyone can share the Network card experience
>> ls onborad PCI Expresscard better or Plug in slot PCI Express card good?
>> How are their performance in Gig transfer rate?
> IMHO, Nothing beats a good intel NIC.
> I'm a big fan of the intel pro/1000GT.
> In terms of performance, I think it is more determined by the card chipset.

The e1000 & e1000e linux driver docs include READMEs which detail some of the diffs between the various chipsets used by these NICs:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=9180&keyword=e1000&lang=eng
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=15817&keyword=e1000e&lang=eng

Some support jumbo frames, some do not.  I've seen some server motherboards come with two different on-board 8257x chipsets on the same board -- one that supports jumbo and one that does not (yikes!)

The driver can make a huge difference in performance.  If your driver sucks, don't expect performance to be much better.  e1000/e1000e in Linux has a lot of tweakables, and getting these running at line-rate in a LAN is not that difficult.  You motherboard manual (bus topology) and output of 'lspci -tv' can help you determine the best PCI slot to stick the card into to avoid contention.  Some cards support checksum offloading, 'ethtool -S' can often tell you whether that's working or not, etc.

-Chris

--
Chris Tracy <ctracy at es.net>
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory