Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.3

* Fixed a bug in the error handling code which handles reception of ethernet frames in which link level errors (such as Symbol Errors or bad Frame Check Sequence) were detected by the hardware. The bug could cause packets with data errors to go undetected, or the system to panic with: Assertion failed: file "/Users/.../i82597_hw.cpp", line 336:  mbuf.

Known issues with SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.3

* In order to ensure that flow control works reliably, the adapter must be configured with a Maximum Packet Size (MTU) that is "2 modulus 4", meaning some number that is two bytes more than an even multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. 11998 instead of 12000). If flow control is not enabled, or if the occasional lost packet (once every 1 or 2 minutes) under heavy load is not an issue, then this MTU constraint could be ignored.

* The media type is always reported as "10GbaseSR" (e.g. by ifconfig), even for CX4 cards.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.2

* Fixed bug introduced in version 3.1, in which the hardware bug workaround can cause packet loss when flow control is enabled and MTU is not set to a value that is 2 modulus 4.

Known issues with SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.2

* In order to ensure that flow control works reliably, the adapter must be configured with a Maximum Packet Size (MTU) that is "2 modulus 4", meaning some number that is two bytes more than an even multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. 11998 instead of 12000). If flow control is not enabled, or if the occasional lost packet (once every 1 or 2 minutes) under heavy load is not an issue, then this MTU constraint could be ignored.

* The media type is always reported as "10GbaseSR" (e.g. by ifconfig), even for CX4 cards.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.1

* Added workaround to hardware bug in flow control, in which an occasional outbound XOFF Pause Frame could become corrupted under heavy traffic. These corrupted Pause Frames were ignored by the peer, allowing it to overdrive the receiver, leading to lost packets. Note: a necessary component of this workaround is that the adapter's MTU must be set to a value that is 2 modulus 4 (see Known issues below).

Known issues with SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.1

* In order to ensure that flow control works reliably, the adapter must be configured with a Maximum Packet Size (MTU) that is "2 modulus 4", meaning some number that is two bytes more than an even multiple of 4 bytes (e.g. 11998 instead of 12000). If flow control is not enabled, or if the occasional lost packet (once every 1 or 2 minutes) under heavy load is not an issue, then this MTU constraint could be ignored.

* The media type is always reported as "10GbaseSR" (e.g. by ifconfig), even for CX4 cards.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.0

* Added support for persistent driver configuration parameters, stored in file "/Library/SmallTree/Intel82597/SmallTreeIntel82597.conf" which is parsed and pushed to the driver by a system startup script.

* Added VLAN support.

* Improved interrupt coalescing algorithm to generate receive-related interrupts more efficiently and to eliminate the reliance on transmit-related interrupts.

* Increased PCI bus efficiency by reducing the number of Tx Descriptors that the adapter needs to write back into the Tx Ring in host memory.

With the above performance improvements, single stream TCP throughput using 12000 byte MTU improved to 5.37 Gbps, with the sender 67% busy and the receiver 50% busy (measured by iperf -l64K -w512K between two 2.3 GHz XServes running on Mac OS X 10.4.3 ).

Known issues with SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 3.0

* The media type is always reported as "10GbaseSR" (e.g. by ifconfig), even for CX4 cards.

* Under heavy loads, with flow control enabled, incoming packets can be lost due to a hardware bug which causes outgoing XOFF (flow control) frames to be garbled, eventually allowing the Adapter's Receive Buffers to become exhausted. These lost packets will be reported in "stexutil getStats" output as nonzero counts for the "NIC Missed Pkts" and/or "Rx Overruns (ICR.RXO)" statistics.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 2.2

Added support for CX4 (copper) NICs.
Added support for STCTrace utility.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 2.1

Fixed a potential data corruption problem which could occur under certain timing conditions when hardware checksumming was enabled.

Improved performance on Mac OS X versions 10.4 (Tiger) and later by using 4 KByte mbufs.
 
Improved performance on Mac OS X versions 10.4 (Tiger) and later by implementing the "MbufSpeedup" algorithm. This optimises the restocking of the Receive Buffer Pool by allocating many mbufs under a single lock ownership.

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Release Notes for SmallTreeIntel82597 driver version 2.0

Added support for Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger).

Installer now also supports installs to Volumes other than the Root Volume.

(C)opyright Small Tree Communications, LLC 2004