Howdy,

I just inherited an sbus HME board (501-2919) and tried to give it a whirl.
As the reports last month indicated, performance was "lackluster", but it
did indeed work as advertised.  Thanks, guys!

It autodetected the appropriate speed (100baseT-FDX for my switch, and
10baseT for an older hub).  The card is in a SparcClassic with a reasonably
fast hard drive on a quiet network, running the 1.5_ALPHA snapshot.

Just a few questions.  In both 100baseT modes (i.e. 100baseT and
100baseT-FDX), when there are a lot of incoming packets (i.e. with an ftp
get), I get a lot of hme0: status=10021<GOTFRAME,RFIFOVF,RXTOHOST> messages.

How does one turn this message off, and why is it not turned off by default?

Why does the direction of transfer affect performance so much?

Here are my unscientific findings (same client, same server, same ethernet
cable, etc.):

card/mode		ftp get		ftp put
hme 100baseT-FDX	330 KB/s	780 KB/s
hme 100baseT		325 KB/s	760 KB/s
hme 10baseT-FDX		820 KB/s	290 KB/s
hme 10baseT		810 KB/s	810 KB/s
built-in le0 (10baseT)	860 KB/s	810 KB/s
sbus le1 (AUI)		860 KB/s	810 KB/s

So, why is my performance (even with le-based ethernet) so much below
theoretical throughput?  The server I'm testing against has 100baseT-FDX
and supports 8 MB/s transfers to different clients with 100baseT.  My
subnet has very low traffic.  The hard drive in my sparc sustains 3.5 MB/s
transfers.  Other 10baseT systems on my network can transfer at 1.1 MB/s
from this server.

And, in an effort to help, I'm willing to *loan* my sbus hme board for a
few months to anyone willing to work on the driver to increase performance.

Thanks,
  -- MW

hme0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0x8c00000 level 4 (ipl 7): address
08:00:20:1e:17:34
nsphy0 at hme0 phy 1: DP83840 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
nsphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
ledma0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0x8400010: rev 2
le0 at ledma0 slot 4 offset 0x8c00000 level 6: address 08:00:20:1e:17:34
le0: 8 receive buffers, 2 transmit buffers
le1 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0xc00000 level 7: address 08:00:20:1e:17:34
le1: 8 receive buffers, 2 transmit buffers