[OmniOS-discuss] The ixgbe driver, Lindsay Lohan, and the Greek economy

[Dan McDonald]

You should PLEASE share your original note with the illumos developer's list.

Also, please keep in mind that it is VERY possible you're seeing crosscall effects where the interrupt-servicing CPU core is not on the same PCIe bus as where you're card is plugged in.

I never got a chance to perform these tests fully when I *had* ixgbe HW handy, but I observed bizarre improvements, or the disappearance of bizarre effects, if I:

	- disabled the HT-inspired CPUs (psradm -f <HT CPUs>)

	- Disabled one of the two CPUs (again, using psradm).

You may wish to try messing around with what OS-reported CPUs are on your Romley (Xeon E5) system.

I will also note that it's high time for illumos to pull in the ixgbe updates from upstream.  Intel is NOT being very helpful here, partially because of fear-of-Oracle, and partially because there aren't enough illumos customers to make a dent in their HW sales.

In the past, illumos developers have found the time to yank in the newest driver updates from upstream.  That hasn't happened recently. For the record, OmniTI might be able to contribute here IF AND ONLY IF a sufficiently paying customer motivates us. I suspect the same answer (sufficiently paying customer) applies to engineers from any other illumos shop as well.

Dan