Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2001 00:25:11 -0500 From: "Matthew Rezny" <mrezny@umr.edu> To: "alpha@freebsd.org" <alpha@freebsd.org> Subject: Intel Gigabit driver (if_wx) Message-ID: <200104060625.BAA06288@mrelay.cc.umr.edu>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I got a few gigabit network cards that use the Intel 82542 chip. They work find in FreeBSD/i386, Linux, and Win2000. However, under FreeBSD/alpha there is a serious problem. When connected, the Alpha box has no problem, but the oter box has its CPU pegged at 100% kernel/system usage and is barely responsive at the console. A ping results in very few returned packets, and with times vary from a few humdred ms to several seconds. When the other box is FreeBSD/alpha is see "wx0: receive sequence error" repeated MANY MANY times. I suspected platform differences are the problem so I searched for "long" in the driver files. I found "long" and "u_long" in use in both if_wx.c and if_wxvar.h, so I replaced them with "int" and "unsigned int" respectively. I know long and int are 4bytes on i386, however long is 8 bytes on Alpha. u_long is something I'm not familiar with so assume its short for unsigned long and thus unsugned int would be the proper replacement. I recompiled after my changed and got a few warnings about wrong pointer size so it would appear so other file linked against has a similar problem. Once I booted with the modified driver I got MUCH better results. A few packets are dropped (14% packet loss on a 540 packet ping), but those returned average 0.263ms. Its about half that when its FreeBSD/i386 connecting to NT, and without packet loss. The NT box has about 80% kernel CPU usage when the link is up, which should not be teh case, but at least the box is responsive. Is there anyone on this mailing list that would be in the position to look into this in more detail? As it is, the Intel gigabit driver is useless on Alpha until this is fixed. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200104060625.BAA06288>