Determining the capabilities of a NIC on a Solaris host


There are a myriad of NIC chipsets in use by the major server vendors (Broadcom, Intel, NVidia, etc.), and each chipset typically contains a unique set of capabilities (e.g., hardware offload support, some amount of on board cache devoted to RX / TX rings, hardware flow classification, etc.). To see which capabilities a given NIC chipset supports, you can usually read through the technical white papers and engineering documents that were published when the chipset shipped. To find the NIC chipsets that are in use on a Solaris host, the kstat utility can be run with the the name of a network driver, the instance of the driver, and the “chipid” name:

$ kstat -m bge -i 0 -n chipid | head -10

module: bge instance: 0 name: chipid class: net asic_rev 2416115712 bus_size 64 bit bus_speed fast bus_type PCI-X businfo 4746 cache_line_size 16 chip_type 5715 command 342

This will display a number of pieces of information, including the type of BUS in use, whether it is 32- or 64-bit, and the chipset version. In the output above, we can see that a 64-bit PCI express Broadcom model 5715 adapter is in use by the server. Kstat rocks!

This article was posted by Matty on 2008-02-13 23:45:00 -0400 -0400