Todo #16741
open
Feedback on Hardware — Hardware Tuning and Troubleshooting
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Description
Page: https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tune.html
Feedback:
"By default, the Chelsio driver implements rate limiting capabilities which can be undesirable for routing performance. To disable this rate limiting capability, add the following as a Loader Tunable..."
Poor/misleading wording / outdated info, especially for modern T5/T6 cards?
1) Setting to 1 would disable * everything * except mopst basic functions. Unmodified sysctl value is 97 (64+32+1) so 1 would disable other working capabilities, according to online search this could cause tools such as RSS to also be disabled. Online sources suggest that the "rate limiting" relates to the card trying to manage fairness in highly congested ISP-grade environments. In a home network or 10G LAN these issues are said to be unlikely and not worth disabling for.
2) Also wording is poor, it suggests setting to 1 without appreciating that zeroing all the other bits will disable other functionality unintentionally. Suggested reword along these lines: "This is a binary value for card NIC capabilities. Setting bit (X) (decimal value) to zero will disable rate limiting capabilities in case of issues, especially with old Chelsio cards."
Updated by Jim Pingle 5 days ago
- Status changed from New to Feedback
The info on the doc was provided by users in the past, see issues such as #10371 and #14207.
As we do not sell or support those cards, we are passing along information provided by other users. It's entirely possible it is out of date or only affected certain models that are not as common now.
Ideally this should be discussed with other users of that hardware on the forum to gather more input on current hardware and behaviors, rather than making assumptions about the entire product line. There haven't been many (any?) other complaints of issues from that setting, so it may still be beneficial to some. However, without more info on the particulars with that driver/hardware backed up by feedback from more users of that hardware, it's hard to be more specific.