On Apr 26, 2011, at 5:21 PM, Jonathan Tripathy wrote: On 26/04/2011 18:53, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote: On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:03 PM, John Madden <jmadden@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
so your 1gbit pipe ends up being, you know, .8gbit storage and .2gbit
protocol (I don't know what the exact numbers are)
more like .96gbit storage and .04gbit protocol.... or .993/.007 on jumbo frames
Are you using TCP and/or iSCSI offload in your NIC? Those seem like pretty good numbers. This reminds me of a question that I was going to ask. I'm spec'ing up a Dell server and they have a "Broadcom® NetXtreme II 5709 Dual Port 1GbE NIC with TOE and iSCSI Offload". Does anyone have any idea on how to enable the iSCSI offload under Linux? Or does it "just work"?
Linux has a module named bnx2i which enables iSCSI Offload and on CentOS is "just works" (as it's automatically loaded).
However it fails to work on all my NICs, even though they are known to support iSCSI Offload (I even downloaded the latest vendor driver but it doesn't work), see dmesg output below.
In my case those are actually quad port, though, but same model (5709) from Dell PowerEdge R710 servers.
Loading NIC's driver bnx2:
Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2 v2.0.18c (Sep 13, 2010) eth0: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem d6000000, IRQ 24, node addr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem d8000000, IRQ 25, node addr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx eth2: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem da000000, IRQ 26, node addr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx eth3: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (C0) PCI Express found at mem dc000000, IRQ 27, node addr xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Loading iSCSI Offload bnx2i:
Broadcom NetXtreme II iSCSI Driver bnx2i v2.1.3b (Oct 06, 2010) iscsi: registered transport (bnx2i) bnx2i: dev eth0 does not support iSCSI bnx2i: dev eth1 does not support iSCSI bnx2i: dev eth2 does not support iSCSI bnx2i: dev eth3 does not support iSCSI
On "XCP" the module bnx2i is not available and I didn't even try to install.
If anyone has any info on that, it would be very much appreciated.
Best regards, Eduardo. | 
