Connect your Macbook Pro to a 10G Ethernet network
In the previous article , the not very expensive opportunity to launch a 10G Ehternet network was considered for cataloging and photo and video processing tasks.
But to connect to a modern network of such a Macbook Pro is not very simple. With the interfaces of these laptops, the situation is, let's say, specific.
To the usual Gigabit Macbook network, you can connect via USB3 - Gigabit Ethernet adapter. If this performance is enough, we get a good budget solution. But not in our case.
It remains the only high-speed interface of this laptop - Thunderbolt.
There are no ready-made ThunderBolt-10G Ethernet adapters. But several manufacturers produce so-called Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis. Boxes with a pair of Thunderbolt interfaces and one or two PCIe slots.
And in these slots you can put a lot of things. Including a suitable 10G card.
The key word is appropriate. Not every Thunderbolt 10G card is compatible. Manufacturers of these "boxes" such cards test and publish a list of compatible.
A plus can be considered the fact that if the card from at least one manufacturer Expansion Chassis is listed as compatible, it will most likely work in the products of any manufacturer of "boxes".
It turns out quite an elegant solution. Expansion Chassis together with the card (in my case there was a 2-port card from Myricom) we set up at some distance from the laptop so as not to interfere. We include as long a Thunderbolt cable as possible (up to 3m, you can use regular cables, longer ones - only optical ones), and the other end of the cable - in a Macbook.
')
Expansion Chassis from some manufacturers is included only when it receives a signal from the Thunderbolt cable. It's comfortable. But the fact that some models have a rather noisy fan will please few people.
You will need to install 10G card drivers on your Macbook. And if everything is done correctly, in Mac OSX we have 10G ports.
Further the most interesting begins - to achieve maximum performance from our design.
Those who dealt with 10G cards know that it would be good to set them up for optimal performance. The driver has quite a few "handles" for which you can twist. The point of tuning is to balance the computing resources of the computer required to service a high-performance network card with the resources required by the tasks performed on the machine.
How to do this is usually described in detail in the documentation. Sometimes this information is not enough, but the support of the card manufacturer comes to the rescue. When I set up my first 10G network, I talked with technical support for several days.
The first thing you can turn on is to enable TCP processing of packets by the processor (TCP Large Receive Offload) and find the optimal value for it.
Then configure the interrupt frequency generated by the card. It depends on how much processor power will be allocated to work with the card.
Further - it is useful to increase the socket buffer size.
Finally, test the system carefully.
In the end - about the cost.
Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis costs anywhere from $ 350.
10G Ethernet card - anywhere from $ 200.
Thunderbolt cable for 3m - about $ 40.
All this - when ordering either on the websites of manufacturers or on ebay.
If it seems to you that it is not very necessary, think about people who need to “shovel” tens and hundreds of gigabytes of high-resolution photos and videos.
But to connect to a modern network of such a Macbook Pro is not very simple. With the interfaces of these laptops, the situation is, let's say, specific.
To the usual Gigabit Macbook network, you can connect via USB3 - Gigabit Ethernet adapter. If this performance is enough, we get a good budget solution. But not in our case.
It remains the only high-speed interface of this laptop - Thunderbolt.
There are no ready-made ThunderBolt-10G Ethernet adapters. But several manufacturers produce so-called Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis. Boxes with a pair of Thunderbolt interfaces and one or two PCIe slots.
And in these slots you can put a lot of things. Including a suitable 10G card.
The key word is appropriate. Not every Thunderbolt 10G card is compatible. Manufacturers of these "boxes" such cards test and publish a list of compatible.
A plus can be considered the fact that if the card from at least one manufacturer Expansion Chassis is listed as compatible, it will most likely work in the products of any manufacturer of "boxes".
It turns out quite an elegant solution. Expansion Chassis together with the card (in my case there was a 2-port card from Myricom) we set up at some distance from the laptop so as not to interfere. We include as long a Thunderbolt cable as possible (up to 3m, you can use regular cables, longer ones - only optical ones), and the other end of the cable - in a Macbook.
')
Expansion Chassis from some manufacturers is included only when it receives a signal from the Thunderbolt cable. It's comfortable. But the fact that some models have a rather noisy fan will please few people.
You will need to install 10G card drivers on your Macbook. And if everything is done correctly, in Mac OSX we have 10G ports.
Further the most interesting begins - to achieve maximum performance from our design.
Those who dealt with 10G cards know that it would be good to set them up for optimal performance. The driver has quite a few "handles" for which you can twist. The point of tuning is to balance the computing resources of the computer required to service a high-performance network card with the resources required by the tasks performed on the machine.
How to do this is usually described in detail in the documentation. Sometimes this information is not enough, but the support of the card manufacturer comes to the rescue. When I set up my first 10G network, I talked with technical support for several days.
The first thing you can turn on is to enable TCP processing of packets by the processor (TCP Large Receive Offload) and find the optimal value for it.
Then configure the interrupt frequency generated by the card. It depends on how much processor power will be allocated to work with the card.
Further - it is useful to increase the socket buffer size.
Finally, test the system carefully.
In the end - about the cost.
Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis costs anywhere from $ 350.
10G Ethernet card - anywhere from $ 200.
Thunderbolt cable for 3m - about $ 40.
All this - when ordering either on the websites of manufacturers or on ebay.
If it seems to you that it is not very necessary, think about people who need to “shovel” tens and hundreds of gigabytes of high-resolution photos and videos.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/222319/
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