Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:44:40 -0800 (PST) From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.net> Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Serious em problems under -current on two different platforms Message-ID: <XFMail.20061118174440.jdp@polstra.com> In-Reply-To: <200611181621.kAIGLblS075218@lava.sentex.ca>
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On 18-Nov-2006 Mike Tancsa wrote: > Havent had too much experience with PCIe riser cards yet, but have > had some experience with bad PCI-X risers. Any way to test to see if > its a bad riser card? The behaviour almost looks to be a hardware issue ? I agree. There's another slot (with its own riser) in the system, so I can try the card there and see what happens. I'll let you know. It could also be a bad card, of course. I have never seen it work properly yet. However, this wouldn't explain why the same kernel, driver, and userland is also failing to work with my Tyan 2721's onboard 82546EB. (It works flawlessly with earlier versions of the driver, even when ported to the up-to-date kernel.) The symptoms are pretty different on the Tyan, though. There, neither port will transmit anything, and you get TX watchdog timeouts every time you try. Go figure. Back to the Dell. Here's an interesting thing. I went away from the system for a few hours, and now I see that both ports are working again. I can ping flood either port and it works fine. But get this. I started a ping flood on em0, and it's sitting there drawing and erasing the ".", with no loss whatsoever. Now I start a normal 1-per-second ping on em1. Once a second, every time a ping goes through em1, the flood ping on em0 drops exactly 1 packet and draws an extra ".". Very strange. Clearly, operations on one port are affecting what happens on the other port. >>Are you using both ports of the NIC? With an older driver, em0 >>worked fine but em1 did not. > > Yes, actually I am testing the forwarding ability of the box. So far > with FreeBSD, I found that the 2 kernel options below > >#options ADAPTIVE_GIANT # Giant mutex is adaptive. > options NO_ADAPTIVE_MUTEXES > > and turning on fast_forwarding increases performance and > responsiveness of the box. Thanks for that info. It'll be useful to me once I get the NICs working. > any errors at the time on the switch port when things lock up ? Not as far as I can tell, but they may have dropped off the end of the stats by the time I checked. There doesn't seem to be a way to get cumulative stats from this switch, at least not through the GUI interface. John
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