Re: be ethernet - IPv6 / mcast broken ?

[Michael <macallan%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

On Fri, 17 Feb 2017 13:37:32 -0500
Brandon Applegate <brandon%burn.net@localhost> wrote:

> > (2) You might find that the BigMac interface is defaulting to
> > half-duplex operation, which modern switches/hubs tend not to like
> > at 100MBit/sec. I'm not sure if BigMac even supports full-duplex at
> > 100Mbit/sec, but if it does, you may need to force it using
> > OpenBOOT commands.  
> 
> It is.  It seems to work (my switches are fine with it).  Obviously
> not optimal though...

According to the man page it's half duplex only. Seems to work with my
switch though.

> > (3) The BigMac hardware 1.x and 2.x were notoriously buggy at the
> > hardware/firmware level. Sun released a longish sequence of patches
> > for SunOS 4 and Solaris 2, and even for OpenBOOT system firmware
> > (SFE 2.x requires OBP 2.26) to try and address the BigMac hardware
> > issues, but there was always a certain amount of crossed fingers in
> > getting them to work reliably. It is possible that NetBSD may
> > contain better workarounds for the hardware bugs, and might even
> > contain code to address the above system-level "hardware reasons"
> > on sun4c, although that does sound a bit optimistic. 
> 
> That makes a ton of sense with regard to how this guy is behaving.
> Sounds like this card had a couple of strikes against it from the
> get-go...

I'm not so sure that's what we're seeing here. I can reproduce the IPv6
issue on an SS20 for starters, but IPv4 operation seems to work fine.
According to the driver mine's a rev. 1

> > (4) The SunSwift (hme) 100Mbit/sec Ethernet cards were also not
> > supported by Sun in sun4c, but in that particular case, appears to
> > be simply because Sun never went to the effort of formally
> > qualifying them in such systems, rather than due to any known
> > imcompatibilities? And they certainly did not have the crippling
> > hardware bugs that the BigMac cards did. If you have a SunSwift
> > card to hand, there might be some mileage in giving that a try
> > instead, although of course no guarantees on an IPX. 
> 
> I see.  I read the sparc port hardware page - and saw lots of "not
> supported on sun4c”.  Sounds like what you are saying is that the hme
> is much better than the brain-damaged be, but the caveat is that it
> too isn’t “officially” blessed in a sun4c box.

It is, and the cards are fairly common. They also support hardware
checksum offloading which should help with slow CPUs.

have fun
Michael