Sun Microsystems 10GBE XFP manual Configuring the nxge Device Driver Parameters

C H A P T E R 5

Configuring the nxge Device Driver Parameters

The nxge device driver controls the Sun x8 Express Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. You can 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 page 35

■“Setting nxge Driver Parameters on a Solaris Platform” on page 36

■“Setting Parameters Using the ndd Utility” on page 36

■“Setting Parameters Using the nxge.conf File” on page 38

■“Setting Parameters on a Linux Platform” on page 46

nxge Hardware and Software Overview

The Sun x8 Express Dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fiber XFP Low Profile Adapter 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 flow to 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 resources to support I/O

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