3 ms·

Not OP, but I'd wager that one factor is that Mellanox has high-quality, well-maintained (by Mellanox themselves), open-source drivers for their 100 GbE NICs in

Not OP, but I'd wager that one factor is that Mellanox has high-quality, well-maintained (by Mellanox themselves), open-source drivers for their 100 GbE NICs in the FreeBSD kernel. I'm not sure if the Chelsio cxgbe driver supports 100 GbE yet (I don't think it does) and I'm pretty certain that there aren't yet any drivers for any 100 GbE NICs from any of the others. I don't have a need for anything close to 100 GbE so I haven't really kept up on this so there could be by now but, even if there are, Mellanox was first.

kev009 9y ago
I'll probably get some scowls for this but Mellanox sales and support has rubbed me the wrong way numerous times. I'm trying to mend that at the moment for my company. Chelsio has a more technically interesting product to me so far, although they weren't as quick to market for 25/100g. Their T6 line does the same line speeds as ConnectX4/5. Chelsio prices are haggle free and puzzling low, which I think vendors like Broadcom, Intel and Mellanox put a ton of wiggle room in their NIC pricing to give your procurement person a nice softball win on how much they "saved" on MSRP. Meh, I'd rather not play games.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  Nah, I've heard similar about both Mellanox and Solarflare sales people. Are you running the Chesio cards in production then? Any feedback there? Can you recommend them?
  - kev009 9y ago
    I have many thousand in revenue service, as does Netflix (https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/). It's the only NIC we buy for 2+ years at $LLNW. T6 requires a little bit of care on Linux, the LTS kernels don't have all the bells and whistles but should pass packets due to common mailbox API. I think kernel 4.13 is fairly complete. It's plug and play on supported FreeBSD versions (10.4, 11.1, -STABLE, HEAD). We run fbsd HEAD for main product line and some Ubuntu 16.04 for other product lines where I packaged up the out of tree driver for kernel 4.4.

kev009 9y ago

I'll probably get some scowls for this but Mellanox sales and support has rubbed me the wrong way numerous times. I'm trying to mend that at the moment for my company. Chelsio has a more technically interesting product to me so far, although they weren't as quick to market for 25/100g. Their T6 line does the same line speeds as ConnectX4/5. Chelsio prices are haggle free and puzzling low, which I think vendors like Broadcom, Intel and Mellanox put a ton of wiggle room in their NIC pricing to give your procurement person a nice softball win on how much they "saved" on MSRP. Meh, I'd rather not play games.

bogomipz 9y ago
Nah, I've heard similar about both Mellanox and Solarflare sales people. Are you running the Chesio cards in production then? Any feedback there? Can you recommend them?
- kev009 9y ago
  I have many thousand in revenue service, as does Netflix (https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/hardware/). It's the only NIC we buy for 2+ years at $LLNW. T6 requires a little bit of care on Linux, the LTS kernels don't have all the bells and whistles but should pass packets due to common mailbox API. I think kernel 4.13 is fairly complete. It's plug and play on supported FreeBSD versions (10.4, 11.1, -STABLE, HEAD). We run fbsd HEAD for main product line and some Ubuntu 16.04 for other product lines where I packaged up the out of tree driver for kernel 4.4.