Subject: SKGE backport to 2.4 : success

From: Willy Tarreau <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 22:57:07 +0200

Hi Stephen,

In my own kernels, I've added your backport of SKGE to 2.4 that I found
here :

   http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/releases/skge-sky2-backport.tar.bz2

It seems to work pretty well compared to the original syskonnect driver
(up to and including 8.36). Several people around me have reported very
slow NFS operations with the official driver, which I finally attributed
to a strange effect of UDP packets not going out after a while until they
get "pushed" by a TCP packet. I even noticed the problem at the company
and we turned the NFS server to an unused 100 Mbps card to workaround the
problem before being able to fully ananlyze the problem.

It seems your driver is getting mature and its performance is very close to
the official one, while its code is smaller and apparently more reliable. I
was thinking about merging it in mainline 2.4 as a fix for people having
trouble with the syskonnect driver. It might also be easier to backport fixes
from 2.6 to 2.4 when the driver is the same.

I don't think we risk any regression because it won't replace an existing
driver, but will provide one to people who are used to download new versions
from an external tree.

Also, I'm not yet sure whether I would also backport the sky2 driver, because
I know about a handful boxes running in production with the official one with
88E8053 chips at high packet rates with no trouble at all. Anyway, as long as
the backport does not prevent them from using the external driver, there
should be no problem.

I'd like to get your opinion on this matter, and of course, Jeff's and Davem's.

Thanks in advance,
Willy