My friend who works in NVidia always complains about how Software drivers have to cover all the mistakes in the hardware. I never faced any issue like that, until today. There was this GBPS network card which gives a pathetic netperf throughput of 780Mbps. After checking a lot of stuff I chanced upon a discussion in netdev about the same driver and how the driver works around a software bug by disabling a very important feature.
I removed the workaround from the kernel, recompiled and installed it on the test machine. I ran netperf and presto! It comes to 989Mbps, as close as possible to the line speed of the interface! As for the hardware bug, it does not get triggered in this particular hardware setup since it requires the PCI-X bus running at 100/133MHz, whereas the test machine's bus is only 66MHz. Problem solved.
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