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CHAPTER 5
Configuring the nxge Device DriverParameters
The nxge device driver controls the Sun x8 Express Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet
interfaces. Youcan manually set the nxge driver parameters to customize each
device in your system.
This chapter lists the available device driver parameters and describes how you can
set these parameters.
■“nxge Hardware and Software Overview” on page33
■“Setting nxge Driver Parameters on a Solaris Platform” on page 34
■“Setting Parameters Using the ndd Utility” on page 34
■“Setting Parameters Using the nxge.conf File” on page 36
■“Setting Parameters on a Linux Platform” on page 44

nxge Hardware and Software Overview

The Sun x8 Express Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber XFP Low ProfileAdapter
provides two 10-Gigabit Full Duplex networking interfaces. The device driver
automatically sets the link speed to 10000 Mbit/sec and conforms to the IEEE 802.3
Ethernet standard. Each interface has 8 Receive DMA Channels and 12 Transmit
DMA Channels to allow for parallel processing of the packets. The Sun x8 Express
Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber XFP Low Profile Adapter extends CPU and OS
parallelism to networking with its support for hardware-based flow classification
and multiple DMAs. Using CPU thread affinity to bind a given flowto a specific
CPU thread,it enables a one-to-one correlation of Rx and Tx packets across the same
TCP connection. This can help avoid cross-calls and context switching to deliver
greater performance while reducing the need for CPU resourcesto support I/O