Driver Enhancements

The following driver features and enhancements have been added to the Solaris 10 10/09 release.

Enhanced 10 Gigabit Ethernet Performance

The Solaris 10 10/09 includes many enhancements to the Solaris 10GbE drivers. The nxge 10GbE driver includes the following enhancements:

• TCP receive throughput is improved from 40% at 8 connections to over 90% improvements for 32, 100, 400, and 1000 connections

• TCP transmit throughput is improved from almost 80% at 8 connections to over 100% for the higher connection tests

• UDP transmit throughput is improved from 80% for 64 byte messages to over 160% for 8 Kbyte messages

The ixgbe driver on x86 systems includes the following enhancements:

• TCP transmit throughput is improved to almost 100% for 8 or more connections

• TCP receive rates are 10Gb line rate for 8, 32, 100, 400, and 1000 connections

• UDP transmit maximum throughput doubles to 10Gb line rate

• Ping pong data rates are improved from 2x to 3x as the message size increases from 64 bytes to 512 bytes

Solaris 10GbE drivers can now deliver close to line data rates providing optimal performance on 10 Gigabit networks.

InfiniBand Feature Improvements

The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes the following InfiniBand-related enhancements:

• InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes a significantly enhanced InfiniBand driver for the Mellanox ConnectX HCA. The InfiniBand driver enables InfiniBand protocols to operate over both Double Data Rate (DDR) and Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand fabrics. The driver is also integrated into the Solaris FMA framework for fault management and the driver supports relaxed ordering on SPARC systems.

• InfiniBand Transport Framework (IBTF) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes a significantly improved IBTF implementation that provides enhanced support for running RDMA-based InfiniBand protocols in Solaris. InfiniBand for SPARC now supports both the PCI Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR).

• Internet Protocol over InfiniBand (IPoIB) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes a significantly improved IPoIB driver (ibd) supporting Internet RFCs 4391 and 4392. The IPoIB driver in the Solaris 10 10/09 release supports the User Datagram (UD) mode of operation, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, and takes advantage of hardware offloads in the ConnectX HCA for improved throughput at lower CPU utilization. IPoIB-UD enables the use of any TCP/IP application protocol such as SSH, HTTP, FTP, NFS, and iSCSI over both Double Data Rate (DDR) and Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand fabrics. The new IPoIB driver for both SPARC and x86 platforms offers a significant performance boost over the previously available driver.

• Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes a significantly improved SDP driver and sockfs implementation. SDP is a transport protocol layered over the Infiniband Transport Framework (IBTF). SDP is a standard implementation based on Annex 4 of the Infiniband Architecture Specification Vol 1. The SDP protocol provides reliable byte-stream, flow controlled two-way data transmission that is similar to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). InfiniBand programmers use SDP through the libsdp C library that supports a sockets-based SOCK_STREAM interface to application programs. The SDP protocol supports graceful close, IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, the connecting/accepting connect model, out-of-band (OOB) data and common socket options. The SDP protocol also supports kernel bypass data transfers and data transfers from send-upper-layer-protocol (ULP) buffers to receive ULP buffers.

• Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes an improved RDSv1 driver certified for use with Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) 10gR2.

• User-Level Direct Access Programming Library (uDAPL) – The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes an updated uDAPL over InfiniBand API that conforms to the latest Direct Access Transport (DAT) Collaborative uDAPL 1.2 specification.

Driver for LSI MPT 2.0-Compliant SAS2.0 Controllers

The mpt_sas(7D) driver supports SAS, SATA, SMP physical devices, and virtual devices by using the Integrated RAID feature. The new architecture for SAS drivers supports the following features:

• SAS initiator ports (iports)

• Dynamic reconfiguration of SAS, SATA, and SMP targets

• FWARC 2008/013-compliant device representation

• Multipathing

For more information, see the mpt_sas(7D) man page.

x86: Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver

The Solaris 10 10/09 release includes new chipsets support such as bcm5716c and bcm5716s.

x86: Interrupt Remapping Support for Intel Vt-d

The Solaris 10 10/09 release provides an interrupt-remapping table that isolates interrupts on at least the Intel Nehalem platform and ensures that devices can only use authorized interrupts and that the interrupts are properly targeted. This feature improves system reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS).

x86: SATA Tape Devices Supported by the AHCI Driver

SATA tape devices are now supported by the AHCI driver. Users can connect or hot-plug the SATA tape drive to the AHCI controller though the SATA or eSATA cable. Error handling mechanism is also enhanced for SATA ATAPI devices including CD, DVD, or tape.

For more information, see the ahci(7D) man page.

Sun StorageTek 6Gb/s SAS PCIe RAID HBA Driver

The mr_sas MegaRAID SAS2.0 controller host bus adapter driver is a SCSA-compliant nexus driver that supports the LSI MegaRAID SAS 92xx series of controllers and the StorageTek 6Gb/s SAS RAID HBA series of controllers and the LSI MegaRAID SAS 92xx series of controllers.

Some of the supported RAID features include:

• RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 6, and RAID spans 10, 50 and 60

• Online capacity expansion (OCE)

• Online RAID level migration (RLM)

• Auto resume after loss of system power during array rebuild or reconstruction (OCE or RLM)

• Configurable stripe size up to 1 Mbyte

• Capability to check consistency for background data integrity

• Patrol read for media scanning and repairing

• 64 logical drive support

• Up to 64 TB LUN support

• Automatic rebuild, and global and dedicated hot—spare support

Intel 82599 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller

Starting with the Solaris 10 10/09 release, the ixgbe driver supports the Intel 82599 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller chipset.

Intel 82598 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller

Starting with the Solaris 10 10/09 release, the ixgbe driver supports the Intel 82598 10Gb PCI Express Ethernet Controller chipset.