Release Notes for 'ed' Device Driver
David Greenman, 24-May-1993
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Last updated: 22-November-1993
The 'ed' device driver is a new, high performance device driver supporting
the Western Digital/SMC 80x3 series (including 'EtherCard PLUS' 'Elite16' and
'Ultra'), the 3Com 3c503 (both 8 and 16 bit versions), and the Novell NE1000/
NE2000. All of the ethernet controllers use the DS8390, 83C690, or 83C790
Network Interface Controller (NIC). The differences between the boards are in
their memory capacity, bus width (8/16 bits), special logic (asic) used to
configure the board, and the host access method to the NIC memory (shared or
programmed I/O). Every effort has been made to conform to the manufactures'
specifications for the NIC and asic. This includes both normal operation and
The 8390 doesn't provide a mechanism for chained write buffers, so it is
very important for maximum performance to queue the next packet for
transmission as soon as the current one has completed. On boards with 16k or
more of memory, the NIC memory is divided in a way that allows enough space
for two full size packets to be buffered for transmission. When sufficient
data is available for transmission, a packet is copied into the NIC memory,
the transmission is started, and then an additional packet is copied into the
NIC memory (to a different memory area). As soon as the first packet has
completed, transmission of a second packet can then be started immediately.
This results in nearly the highest performance possible from ethernet.
Packets go out on the 'wire' with the following format:
preamble dest-addr src-addr type data FCS intr-frame
64bits 48bits 48bits 16bits 1500bytes 32bits 96bits
With 10Mbits/sec, each bit is 100ns in duration. All of the above fields,
except for data are of fixed length. With full sized packets (1500 bytes), the
maximum unidirectional data rate can be calculated as: 6.4us + 4.8us + 4.8us +
1.6us + 1200us + 3.2us + 9.6us = 1230.4us/packet = 812.74382 packets/second =
1219115.7 (1190k) bytes/second. With TCP, there is a 40 byte overhead for the
IP and TCP headers, so there is only 1460 bytes of data per packet. This
reduces the maximum data rate to 1186606 bytes/second. With TCP, there will
also be periodic acknowledgments which will reduce this figure somewhat both
because of the additional traffic in the reverse direction and because of the
occasional collisions that this will cause. Despite this, the data rate has
still been consistantly measured at 1125000 (~1100k) bytes/second through a TCP
socket. In these tests, the TCP window was set to 16384 bytes. With UDP, there
is less overhead for the headers, and with 1472 bytes of data per packet, a
data rate of 1196358.9 (1168k) bytes/sec is possible. UDP performance hasn't
been precisely measured with this device driver, but less precise tests show
this to be true (measured at around 1135k/second).
The 8390 implements an NIC memory ring-buffer to store incoming packets.
The 8bit boards (8003, 3c503, and NE1000) usually have only 8k bytes of shared
memory. This is only enough room for about 4 full size (1500 byte) packets.
This can sometimes be a problem, especially on the original WD8003E and 3c503.
This is because these boards' NIC memory access speed is also quite slow
compared to newer 16bit boards - typically less than 1MB/second. The additional
overhead of this slow memory access, and the fact that there is only room for 4
full-sized packets means that the ring-buffer will occassionally overflow. When
this happens, the board must be reset to avoid a lockup problem in early
revision 8390's. Resetting the board will cause all of the data in the ring-
buffer to be lost - requiring it to be re-transmitted/received...slowing things
even further. Because of these problems, maximum throughput on boards of this
type is only about 400-600k per second. The 16bit boards, however, have 16k of
memory as well as much faster memory access speed. Typical memory access speed
on these boards is about 1.7-4MB/second (with the Novell NE2000 being the
slowest and the SMC 8013 being the fastest). These boards generally have no
problems keeping up with full ethernet speed. The only problem I've seen with
these boards is related to the (slow) performance of the BSD Net/2 malloc code
when additional mbufs must be added to the pool. This can sometimes increase
the total time to remove a packet enough for a ring-buffer overflow to occur.
This tends to be highly transient, and quite rare on fast machines. I've only
seen this problem when doing tests with large amounts of UDP traffic without
any acknowledgments (uni-directional). Again, this has been very rare.
All of the above tests were done using a 486DX2/66, 486DX/33, 386DX/40,
8-9Mhz ISA bus, using FreeBSD 1.0. TCP tests were done with the 'ttcp'
performance test utility, and also with FTP client/server. UDP tests were done
with a modified version of ttcp (to work around a bug in the BSD Net/2 UDP
code related to queue depth), and also with NFS.
(Note that this driver comes standard in FreeBSD 1.0, NetBSD 0.9, and 386BSD
0.2, and therefore doesn't require installation)
To 'install' this driver, the files if_ed.c and if_edreg.h must be copied
into the i386/isa kernel source directory and the following line must be
added into the file i386/conf/files.i386:
i386/isa/if_ed.c optional ed device-driver
To build a kernel that includes this driver, first comment out any 'we',
'ec', or 'ne' devices in your kernel config file. Then, add a line similar to
the following (modify to match your cards configuration):
device ed0 at isa? port 0x300 net irq 10 iomem 0xcc000 vector edintr
Note that the 'iosiz' option is not needed because the driver automatically
figures this out. However, if you have problems with this, it can be specified
to force the use of the size you specify.
The iomem 0xcc000 option is not need for NE1000/NE2000 boards because they
use programmed I/O rather than shared memory to access the NIC's memory.
On 3Com boards, the tranceiver must be enabled in software (there is no
hardware default). In this driver, this is controlled using the "LLC0" link-
level control flag. The default for this flag can be set in your kernel config
file by specifying 'flags 0x01' in the 'ed' device specification line (this
is necessary for diskless support). Otherwise, the tranceiver is easily enabled
and disabled with a command like "ifconfig ed0 -llc0" to enable the tranceiver
or "ifconfig ed0 llc0" to disable it; this assumes that you have the modified
ifconfig(8) that originally appeared in the 386BSD patchkit. To specify the
'flags' option, use a line similar to:
device ed0 at isa? port 0x300 net irq 10 flags 0x01 iomem 0xcc000 vector edintr
Flags can be similarly specified to force 8 or 16bit mode, and disabling
the use of transmitter double buffering. The various supported flag values
Disable multi TX buffering 0x08
To use multiple flags, simply add the values together. Note that these
numbers are in hexadecimal. If the 'Force 8 bit' and 'Force 16 bit' flags are
both specified, the 8 bit flag has precedence.
The use of the above flags should only be necessary under exceptional
conditions where the probe routine incorrectly determines the board type (such
is the case with Compex boards, which require the 16bit flag and an iosiz
16384), or where the high performance of the transmitter causes problems with
1) Early revision DS8390B chips have problems. They lock-up whenever the
receive ring-buffer overflows. They occassionally switch the byte order
of the length field in the packet ring header (several different causes
of this related to an off-by-one byte alignment) - resulting in "NIC
memory corrupt - invalid length NNNNN" messages. The board is reset
whenever these problems occur, but otherwise there is no problem with
recovering from these conditions.
2) 16bit boards that use shared memory can conflict with 8bit BIOSes, BIOS
extensions (like the VGA), and 8bit devices with shared memory (again
like the VGA, or perhaps a second ethernet board). There is a work-
around for this in the driver, however. The problem is that the
ethernet board stays in 16bit mode, asserting its '16bit' signal on
the ISA bus. This signal is shared by other devices/ROMs in the same
128K memory segment as the ethernet card - causing the CPU to read the
8bit ROMs as if they were 16bit wide. The work-around involves setting
the host access to the shared memory to 16bits only when the memory is
actually accessed, and setting it back to 8bit mode all other times.
Without this work-around, the machine will hang whenever a reboot is
attempted. This work-around also allows the board to co-exist with
other 8bit devices that have shared memory. This has only been
implemented for SMC/WD boards, but I haven't seen this problem with
3Com boards (i.e. if you have a 3Com board, you might experiance the
above problem - I haven't specifically tested for it).
3) The NIC memory access to 3Com and Novell boards is much slower than it is on
SMC boards; it's less than 1MB on 8bit boards and less than 2MB/second
on the 16bit boards. This can lead to ring-buffer overruns resulting in
additional lost data during heavy network traffic.
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