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Date:      Sun, 23 Jan 2005 16:00:32 -0800
From:      "Net Virtual Mailing Lists" <mailinglists@net-virtual.com>
To:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Stefan=20E=DFer?= <se@FreeBSD.org>, <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: NIC card problems....
Message-ID:  <20050124000032.8308@mail.net-virtual.com>
In-Reply-To: <20050123232738.GA78226@StefanEsser.FreeBSD.org>
References:  <20050123232738.GA78226@StefanEsser.FreeBSD.org>

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Hello Stefan (and everyone else!),

Thank you for your great comments!  I think I have a 3c9xx card around
here somewhere, I will give that a shot when it reboots the next time
(just to see).  It looks like for future systems I'll standardize on the
Intel fxp-based cards, I really appreciate that advice!


As for what might actually be causing this crash: I just checked the PCI
configuration and don't see anything in the BIOS which would suggest that
anything you mentioned is something I can modify - is that correct?  Or
are you saying that I am simply pushing past the limits of what this
hardware (and PCI bus) is capable of?

For whatever it is worth, all I have in terms of PCI cards is this NIC
and VGA card (which doesn't run anything gui-like).  I am using the
onboard IDE controller, not sure if that is considered a "PCI card" for
this purpose.  There are no sound cards or anything like that installed.
 The motherboard has no built-in audio.  I can copy all of the possible
PCI settings I have in my bios setup and what they are set to, if you
think that would be helpful here (I would have done it, but I just am not
sure if you are hinting at the possibility there may be something wrong
with the BIOS configuration here)?

I will say that what you are describing could very well be the case, I've
got two disks (one on each of the two built-in controllers) running
pretty hot-and-heavy during most of this too.

- Greg

>A master latency timer value of 32 (0x20) should keep the bus-master
>switch overhead down to 20% (i.e. 80% left for data transfers) and
>should keep the latency in the range of 1 microsecond per bus-master
>(i.e. 5 microseconds if there are 2 Ethernet cards, 2 disk controllers
>and one host bridge active at the same time). In that case, each PCI
>device could expect to transfer 100 bytes every 5 microseconds. A
>buffer of 128 bytes ought to suffice for a fast Ethernet card, in
>that case.
>
...
>
>The TX threshold messages issued by the dc driver appear more as an
>indication that the PCI bus is under severe load, than as a hint that
>the dc driver is causing the reboots, IMHO.
>
>Regards, STefan
>




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