Solaris Driver Software: Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapter User Guide
file:///T|/htdocs/NETWORK/BroadCom/71921/NetXtremeII/en/solaris.htm[9/26/2012 3:28:52 PM]
memory a single interface would consume is:
Single Function Mode
RX: 2048 DMA handles and 5M (MTU=1500) or 21M (MTU=9216) of memory
TX: 20480 DMA handles and 5M (MTU=1500) or 21M (MTU=9216) of memory
Total: 22528 DMA handles and 10M (MTU=1500) or 42M (MTU=9216) of memory
Multifunction Mode (#descs / 4)
RX: 512 DMA handles and 1M (MTU=1500) or 5M (MTU=9216) of memory
TX: 5120 DMA handles and 1M (MTU=1500) or 5M (MTU=9216) of memory
Total: 5335 DMA handles and 2M (MTU=1500) or 10M (MTU=9216) of memory
Interrupt Management
If you have a system with many interfaces, it is possible to reach the allocation limit of MSIX interrupts. By default, Solaris
limits each driver to 2 MSIX allocations, and there is an issue with the pcplusmp module where only a maximum of 31 MSIX
interrupts are available per interrupt priority level.
If your system has four Broadcom BCM57711 network adapter ports, each running in multifunction mode, Solaris will
enumerate 16 bnxe interfaces. The last interface attached will fail to allocate its second MSIX interrupt and revert to Fixed.
This in turn can eventually expose an issue in the system regarding interrupt management resulting in interrupts never being
received on the interface that reverted back to Fixed.
To ensure all interfaces are able to allocate their two MSIX interrupts, the workaround is to change the priority levels of
specific interfaces. Network drivers are automatically assigned an interrupt priority level of 6, so changing an interface's
priority level to 5 is common.
1. First read the driver.conf man page for a background primer.
2. Find out the driver instance paths assigned on your system.
% grep bnxe /etc/path_to_inst
"/pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci14e4,1650@0" 0 "bnxe"
"/pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1/pci14e4,1650@0,1" 1 "bnxe"
3. Normally, the name of the driver is the last portion of the path, but you should use the most appropriate PCI ID found
in /etc/driver_aliases. Depending on how the hardware is layered, there are cases where the name identified in
path_to_inst will not work. To figure out which name to use, examine the output from
prtconf -v
and match against
the IDs specified in the driver_aliases file.
% grep bnxe /etc/driver_aliases
bnxe "pci14e4,164e"
bnxe "pci14e4,164f"
bnxe "pci14e4,1650"
bnxe "pciex14e4,164e"
bnxe "pciex14e4,164f"
bnxe "pciex14e4,1650"
4. The parent of the driver is the entire path leading up to the name.
5. The unit-address is located after the final
@
in the path.
6. Therefore, change both of the bnxe interfaces found in path_to_inst to interrupt priority 5 and use the following config
lines to bnxe.conf:
name = "pciex14e4,1650" parent = "/pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1" unit-address = "0" interrupt-priorities =
5;
name = "pciex14e4,1650" parent = "/pci@0,0/pci8086,2779@1" unit-address = "0,1" interrupt-priorities
= 5;
7. After modifying the config, either reboot the system or unplumb all interfaces and run the update_drv command.
8. When the system has been reconfigured and the interfaces plumbed back up, verify the new interrupt priority settings
by running the following command as root:
% echo "::interrupts -d" | mdb -k
FCoE Support
Overview
FCoE is supported on Solaris 11 with limited support on Solaris 10, Update 9. The following features are the differences in
Solaris 10, Update 9 when compared to Solaris 11:
