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I wonder if any of you have an experience with 10g NICs (Intel, Myricom, SMC tiget, napatech, or by any other brand).

Questions are:

  1. Was it easy to install, or a hassle,
  2. How does this adapter appear on the interface list (ifconfig), as a single one or as two - given the fact, both forms (sfp+ and rj45) formed in two seperate ports (RX and TX).
  3. And most of all, have you used libpcap based application (e.g. tcpdump) to capture the traffic, were there any issues at that part, or all went smooth?

These are the concerns that popped up in my mind but feel free to share and add any piece of information which you think might be relevant to me nevertheless important.

Thanks in advance!

Chopper3
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Tzury Bar Yochay
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  • You imply that your particular NIC has one interface but two ports - is it a dual-personality card that can use either SFP+ or RJ45? If so, it will show up as a single interface. Or does it really separate RX and TX functions into two different ports? That's kinda strange - can you share the card model? – MikeyB Jul 26 '10 at 19:27
  • Sorry for misleading you, I have no card yet! All Iwas saying that I have seen on the web two types of NICs rh45 and sfp+ - both have two ports and apparently appear as eth0 and eth1 - thus as two seperate adapters. – Tzury Bar Yochay Jul 27 '10 at 03:14

2 Answers2

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Yep, all of our OEL/RHEL 5.3/5.4 boxes (generally HP BL460c G6's) simply have dual 10Gbps LOM NICs by Broadcom. Ours work just fine with the standard drivers from the HP PSP driver pack, show up as eth0 and eth1 - no confusion with interface type - and we have indeed used tcpdump - all went smoothly.

Chopper3
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  • well, you are shading light on my darkness dude. may I ask then, have you ever happened to debug the traffic with tcpdump? if so, how did you managed to sync both channels? since it was stored in tow separate files – Tzury Bar Yochay Jul 26 '10 at 18:12
  • The HP adapters don't have two channels, they're SFP+ only, that's why it's easier. – Chopper3 Jul 26 '10 at 20:13
  • Chopper, what do you mean "no two channels"? They still appear as eth0 and eth1 right? that brings my next questions which is after capturing both interfaces, how can I replay (retransmit) those two files (rx.cap and tx.cap) in a synchronous way so to emulate the original sessions? – Tzury Bar Yochay Jul 27 '10 at 03:17
  • Yes, my dual-port cards appear as two channels but I don't get two channels for each port (i.e. only one capture per physical port, I have no splitting). – Chopper3 Jul 27 '10 at 06:04
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bcom, mellanox aned chelsea all work like normal NICs, no rx/tx splitting in the dump. iirc, Intels do the same.

The only difference is when you check the kernel messages, you'll see a higher negotiated speed, that's all

dyasny
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