LAN Driver, Qualcomm Atheros AR8171

stephenw10

What CPU is that throughput data using?

Which pfSense version? Did you compile it against FreeBSD 8.3?

Steve

arrmo

Hi,

This is on pfSense 2.2, compiled on FreeBSD 10.

Sorry, do you mean the CPU load during the test? I admit, didn't monitor that (but I think this may be limiting iperf overall).

Thanks.

stephenw10

I meant what actual CPU are you using. Looking at your board I would expect almost any compatible CPU to be capable of routing at >1Gbps in which case 600Mbps doesn't look that great. I guess the driver is non-optimal, still a lot better than not working at all. ;)

Steve

arrmo

Hi,

I didn't put a great processor in it - just a Pentium G3220. Was trying to build a fairly inexpensive box. But even that is a 3 GHz processor, so you may very well be right.

I did notice that the driver is logging a lot to syslog. I can remove this, and try again … make sense? But ... I don't have a box on the WAN side anymore that runs iperf ... I can install it on the pfSense box, and have it terminate there, but - will it make a difference if I use the WAN or LAN IP address?

Thanks!

arrmo

FYI, recompiled, reinstalled the driver (and rebooted) … and retested. I'm now getting ~ 930 Mb/s, so life is good ... :). I'll be honest though, not sure how to tell if I'm going through the WAN port or not. I am targeting the WAN IP address (from the LAN side), but not sure if it really gets there ... :(.

Thanks.

davros123

Hi arrmo.

Congrat's on getting this working!

I also have this board and would love to run with the single onboard nic (using VLANs).

Can you please post the driver and some instructions (or links) to get this working?

Thanks a heap!

arrmo

Absolutely! More than happy to help out if I can. Is there a place to post the file? I can't attach it here (not of the allowed file types).

Thanks.

stephenw10

Just re-name the file, add .png to the end. Don't use the .txt extension as that confuses some browsers and corrupts the file.

That driver appears to still be in active development, the last commit was only 19days ago, so check back if you find any bugs.
Edit: Nothing major changed since Dec last year though.

Steve

davros123

Excellent!

wikisend.com looks good for small files - no reg. needed.

or as Steve suggested, rar it, then rename to .png and add it to a post here.

arrmo

Hi,

You bet - attached here … just remove the .png from the end (real name is if_alx.ko).

Yes, it's active. I actually spoke to the author before building my driver, asked him to remove some of the console diagnostics (which he very graciously did - very helpful guy!). Let me know if you have any issues with this driver.

Thanks.

if_alx.ko.png

davros123

Thanks.

Do you have a linky or pointers on how to install/use the driver?

I am new to freebsd o/s….guess i can google but all help appreciated.

Thanks.

davros123

ok, found some instructions…but get this error... :-\


[2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(1): kldload /boot/kernel/if_alx.ko
kldload: can't load /boot/kernel/if_alx.ko: Exec format error

[2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(3): uname -a
FreeBSD pfSense.localdomain 8.3-RELEASE-p16 FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p16 #0: Fri Jun 20 13:19:29 EDT 2014     root@pf2_1_1_amd64.pfsense.org:/usr/obj.amd64/usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_SMP.8  amd64
[2.1.4-RELEASE][root@pfSense.localdomain]/root(4):

and this in dmesg

KLD if_alx.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch
linker_load_file: Unsupported file type

stephenw10

Because:
@arrmo:

This is on pfSense 2.2, compiled on FreeBSD 10.

You can't use this module on 2.1.X because that's built on FreeBSD 8.3 as you've seen. Also it has to be the correct architecture, 32 or 64bit. I'm not sure what the module is.

Steve

davros123

Bugger, missed that very important piece if information.

Ok, soooo, what's involved in compiling on 8.3? Can I do this from pfsense (without downloading bucketloads of extra bloat) or do I need to have a freebsd install to compile?

Perhaps I should just cop the extra watts from my pcie Intel nic and run with that…

stephenw10

No, there are no build tools in pfSense and trying to add them will be a disaster. Use FreeBSD 8.3 to build things for pfSense. I have used a bsd live cd to compile simple things before.
I imagine you would have difficulty compiling this kernel module against 8.3 though, a lot has changed between that and 10. Probably easier to take the power hit. ;)

Steve

arrmo

Hi,

Steve has it right - and this is basically what I did (created a VM in VirtualBox, built it there).

FYI, as I missed this above (sorry!), this is an x64 driver.

Thanks.

davros123

Thanks guys.

Might park this one for the moment as time is precious for me at the moment and go with the Intel PCIe nic card for now.

Perhaps we'll see it come standard in a later pfsense release ;)

davros123

Hi arrmo,

I dad some issues with my PCI wifi card so I decided to take the plunge and move to 2.2 ALPHA.

The driver installed without issues (just temporarily loaded it using kldload).

I can not create a VLAN on the alx0 interface.

Can you pls. check to see if you can create VLANs on your interface?

EDIT: looking at the nic with ifconfig, it's not supported…ie does not show VLAN_HWTAGGING

stephenw10

You don't need to have hardware tagging on the NIC to use VLANs it just offloads some work from the driver/CPU. In fact in some cases VLANs work better with it disabled. For example: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/2577

The driver has to know how to handle VLANs though, perhaps this doesn't yet. It's a development driver.
Edit: A quick glance through the code seems to show plenty of VLAN references.

Steve

davros123

Hi Stephen.

Thanks for the reply (and for trawling the code).

Unfortunately the interface still does not show as a valid interface when defining VLAN's (em0 does, but not the alx).