Hello John,
Thanks for the informative reply, do you know what Intel would mean by advertising the NIC with "Performance — Two Queues (Tx & Rx) " then?
If i understand you correctly, are you confirming to me that only a Dual port NIC will deliver different IRQs?
Alex
On 06/08/2013 11:44 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
wait, the 82579 is just a PHY layer for the Intel 6 Series Express CPU chipset's built in MAC (p67, z68, hm67, etc chipsets for the Sandy Bridge family of desktop/mobile CPUs). That combination is also a 'entry level' desktop/workstation or 'mobile embedded' grade ethernet interface, not really a server grade interface at all. regardless, its a single device. single devices, regardless of how many queues they may happen to have, are not reentrant, and can not deal with multiple concurrent IRQ handlers poking at their registers at the same time. you might have more luck with something like this http://ark.intel.com/products/59062/Intel-Ethernet-Server-Adapter-I350-T2 but even so, I doubt it will use multiple CPU cores at the same time, but it probably WILL significantly reduce the CPU overhead of dealing with high volume ethernet traffic.