Intel Pro/1000 in a Qube2 observations

Hi there,

Since things appear to be working with this board I've done a few rough tests with some interesting results (only 100BaseT results at the moment as thats all my current router/hub supports)

1)  By default the hardware checksums are not enabled ... which seems kind of odd you can see the before and after here :

	Before:
	qube2# ifconfig -v wm0
		wm0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        	capabilities=2bf80<TSO4,IP4CSUM_Rx,IP4CSUM_Tx,TCP4CSUM_Rx,TCP4CSUM_Tx,UDP4CSUM_Rx,UDP4CSUM_Tx,TCP6CSUM_Tx,UDP6CSUM_Tx>
        	enabled=0
        	address: 00:15:17:0e:b8:e2
        	media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex,flowcontrol,rxpause,txpause)
        	status: active
      	  	input: 556569 packets, 42363982 bytes, 410 multicasts
        	output: 922440 packets, 1358364969 bytes, 7 multicasts
        	inet 192.168.0.7 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
       	 	inet6 fe80::215:17ff:fe0e:b8e2%wm0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2

	then run :  ifconfig wm0 ip4csum tcp4csum udp4csum

	After:
	qube2# ifconfig -v wm0
		wm0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        	capabilities=2bf80<TSO4,IP4CSUM_Rx,IP4CSUM_Tx,TCP4CSUM_Rx,TCP4CSUM_Tx,UDP4CSUM_Rx,UDP4CSUM_Tx,TCP6CSUM_Tx,UDP6CSUM_Tx>
        	enabled=3f00<IP4CSUM_Rx,IP4CSUM_Tx,TCP4CSUM_Rx,TCP4CSUM_Tx,UDP4CSUM_Rx,UDP4CSUM_Tx>
        	address: 00:15:17:0e:b8:e2
        	media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX full-duplex,flowcontrol,rxpause,txpause)
        	status: active
        	input: 1360390 packets, 103713904 bytes, 467 multicasts
        	output: 2265678 packets, 3334149173 bytes, 7 multicasts
        	inet 192.168.0.7 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
        	inet6 fe80::215:17ff:fe0e:b8e2%wm0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
 
2)  If I read a large file from the Qube2 with the checksums disabled I can get 4.5Mb/s sustained.  If I enable the checksums I get 5.9Mb/s sustained (so worth enabling)

3)  If I copy a large file with the checksums disabled the NFS connection WILL drop off, disconnect and basically break!  If I enable the checksums it seems to stay up. (so REALLY worth enabling)

	But why should the connection break ?  From my OSX client I have mounted with the following options : 

		resvport locallocks rsize=32768 wsize=32768 intr noatime

4)  CLI responsiveness is far more sluggish when the hardware checksums are enabled than when they are disabled ... which doesn't really make sense either ?!


Does anyone have some decent NFS tuning tips ?  I'd like to get good performance on the Qube but not at the expensive of other apps running on it.

Thanks!

Mark

PS.  I still can't get the Intel board to work at all in the Qube3, so it's staying in the Qube2 regardless :-)