SMC91111 performance and copyright

[Peter Dufault]

I'm including you directly, Daniel, since you've done some recent patches for the SMC91111 driver on the Sparc.  That's the only place I think it's used other than on the Phytec MPC5554.  If anyone else is using it then I'd love to know.

The SMC91111 performance on the Phytec Phycore board is horrible.  I haven't worried about it since I use it to boot, store some log files and accept remote commands (that don't happen that often), but I would like to fully use it and I'm trying to figure out why the performance is so bad.

My initial results using the ttcp benchmark were 133 KB/sec linux->RTEMS and 134 RTEMS->Linux.  I managed to get it quite a bit better using 16 bit transfers instead of 32 bit, and by using wireless instead of wired (obviously it's falling down under loading).

Looking at Wireshark I see that everything runs great for a short amount of time and then there are lots of retransmissions and "out-of-order bytes received".  I don't understand this enough to know what's going on, but I think once traffic is flowing the driver breaks down.  So as long as things are very lightly loaded it works OK, as soon as it is busy it will fall down.  It does work reliably, but very slowly.

I looked what I think are later versions of this driver from eCOS.  They are GPL and also have changes where I think they check for activity in places that the RTEMS driver doesn't, that is, poll for input during output, etc.  I have at least three questions:

- The RTEMS driver has no copyright.  Is this because it pre-dates a copyright from eCOS?
- Is this driver in active use and works just fine on SPARC?
- There's a FreeBSD driver for this.  Am I better trying to port that than fix the existing driver?

Here's what comes out of the ttcp test.  As I said, I don't know much about this, but all those "out-of-order bytes" are odd.


************ IP Statistics ************
             total packets received       19050
  packets rcvd for unreachable dest        1931
 datagrams delivered to upper level       17119
    total ip packets generated here        9546

************ TCP Statistics ************
               connections accepted           1
            connections established           1
      conn. closed (includes drops)           1
     segs where we tried to get rtt           2
                 times we succeeded           2
                  delayed acks sent         109
                 total packets sent        9540
              ack-only packets sent        6034
    window update-only packets sent        3505
 control (SYN|FIN|RST) packets sent           1
             total packets received       11636
       packets received in sequence        5709
         bytes received in sequence     8260600
    duplicate-only packets received          38
      duplicate-only bytes received       53576
      out-of-order packets received        5885
        out-of-order bytes received     8516616
                rcvd duplicate acks          34
                   rcvd ack packets           2
           bytes acked by rcvd acks           2
 times hdr predict ok for data pkts        5707




Peter
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Peter Dufault
HD Associates, Inc.      Software and System Engineering