David Christensen wrote:
Julian Elischer wrote:
Ok which clever person did this again?
It just broke our product.
If it hasn't been removed from 7.0 and 6.x yet it's just
about to be...
on the topic above, I've found that the bce driver seems to
be throwingaway packets
larger than the mtu regardless of the rest of the system..
This has been part of the driver since it's initial release,
it's not an addition or change.
the following code seems to be responsible..
in the spirit of "be generous on receive" as mentionned before,
should it be relaxed?
When this RX MTU size issue was being discussed previously I
was wondering why nobody actually discussed what the drivers
are doing. Both the NetXtreme (bge) and NetXtreme II (bce)
controllers have a setting in the RX MAC to specify the MTU
size of the medium. Anything larger than the MTU is discarded
and a statistic is recorded. Support for jumbo frames is
available (though not on all bge supported controllers) but the
general understanding from the hardware design perspective is
that the MTU is the maximum message size on the medium and that
all controllers on the medium should be configured for the same
message size. I've never seen an Ethernet driver that supports
different MTUs for RX and TX (is there one implemented under
FreeBSD?) and I would really hate to troubleshoot any higher
level application problems that might occur if the RX and TX MTU
were different for every system on a network.
/* Calculate and program the Ethernet MTU size. */
ether_mtu = ETHER_HDR_LEN + ETHER_VLAN_ENCAP_LEN +
ifp->if_mtu +
ETHER_CRC_LEN;
DBPRINT(sc, BCE_INFO, "%s(): setting mtu =
%d\n",__FUNCTION__, ether_mtu);
/*
* Program the mtu, enabling jumbo frame
* support if necessary. Also set the mbuf
* allocation count for RX frames.
*/
if (ether_mtu > ETHER_MAX_LEN + ETHER_VLAN_ENCAP_LEN) {
REG_WR(sc, BCE_EMAC_RX_MTU_SIZE, ether_mtu |
BCE_EMAC_RX_MTU_SIZE_JUMBO_ENA);
sc->mbuf_alloc_size = MJUM9BYTES;
} else {
REG_WR(sc, BCE_EMAC_RX_MTU_SIZE, ether_mtu);
sc->mbuf_alloc_size = MCLBYTES;
}
could probably be relaxed in the non jumbo case to accept
packets up to
MCLBYTES in size instead of ether_mtu.
Maybe MCLBYTES is good enough for you but what if someone has
a different requirement? How big is big enough for everyone?
I suppose supporting different MTUs for RX and TX is possible,
though the memory requirements are 5x larger for jumbo frames
over standard frames and many users might consider this a waste
of resources if they don't support jumbo frames on their
network (that would be almost 4MB). Support would obviously
be easier if "ifconfig" support both an RX and TX MTU size.
manually I have set the mtu to larger values which increases
ether_mtu and that seems to work..
now, Why do we need this?
WCCP is a protocol from Cisco.
it encapsulates packets in GRE, including an extra
intermediate header.
when packets are encapsulated in GRE by cisco 6k switches
(quite a few around)
they do NOT frag the result, but instead, send an oversized packet.
if you have a bce interface, it discards these packets which
is a drag.
It could certainly be argued by some that Cisco is not standards
compliant in this case for sending an oversized Ethernet frame
and expecting everyone to accept it. Hardware has limitations
and assuming that all Ethernet controllers can support frames
greater than 1522 bytes is not reasonable. Fortunately there is
a suitable workaround which is setting a larger MTU for the
interface. What size do you use? How did you arrive at that
value?
I use 1550 to make it work in the test harness.
The trouble is that if I set the mtu to 1550, and the machine talks to another
such machine with it's mtu also set to 1550 then they negotiate a maximum sized
packet based on 1550, and the problem hits me again. This is a web proxy
and that problem occurs when there are two layers of proxy and one proxy talks to
another. I really just need it to to silently accept a packet some
32 bytes or so larger than the stated MTU.
I see no reason for the driver to not do what the em driver does and allow
itself to receive any packet up to the MCLBYTES size.
We only hit this problem recently because the data interfaces on our
devices are usually em NICs and we only just recently started allowing the
users to use the built in (on DELL 2950) bce interfaces for this purpose.
Dave
_______________________________________________
freebsd-net@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-net
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
