[Beowulf] Performance tuning for Jumbo Frames

[Patrick Geoffray]

Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> long as it fits in one page. At another time, the switch was more
> likely to drop large frames under high load (maybe something to do
> with internal memory management), so the 9000bytes frames worked most
> of the time while the 1500bytes ones worked all the time...

This is an important point. The way hardware flow-control works in 
Ethernet, a switch has to be able to buffer two full frames plus the 
time on the wire for the round-trip. For the curious, the PAUSEs packets 
are sent in-band and you cannot send or receive partial frames.
So, instead of requiring ~4K per port minimum, you need about ~20K per 
port. Add to that up to 8 priorities with DCB and the buffering 
requirement are quickly getting out of hand. That's one big drawbacks of 
large MTUs, along with contention with wormhole switching.

Patrick
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