Comment 17 for bug 130075

I have to agree that this doesn't look like a hardware problem. If it were,
then how would one explain different kernels behaving differently?

Parenthetically, I have posted some throughput benchmarks for a handful of
nics on the m0n0wall forum for any interested. And no, I have never seen the
nforce GBE lose its interrupt or cease up for any reason in my m0n0walls,
even under full bench load, but then again, m0n0wall doesn't use SMP either.

http://forum.m0n0.ch/index.php/topic,875.0.html

db

On 10/13/07, BullCreek <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> More testing with these boards and latest Gutsy (2.6.22-14-generic x86)
> yields the following observations above and beyond those previously
> reported:
>
> 1. It still locks up under Gutsy latest (I can't tell any change
> between 2.6.22-12 and 2.6.22-14). Someone should probably report this
> as a problem to the kernel mailing list or whoever maintains the
> forcedeth driver.
>
> 2. It isn't hardware though. I booted a XenSource 4.0.1 install in the
> system (partly to test a different distro and partly to see if they had
> support for these nforce boards because SuperMicro makes a dual socket
> Barcelona board based on the big brother workstation version of this
> NF570 chipset that looks fairly tasty except it has the same dual nforce
> LAN setup). The Xen kernel gives the same spurious "too many
> iterations" but unlike Ubuntu, refused to lock up even after hours of
> serious abuse. XenSource's kernel is a stripped down version of 2.6.18
> based on CentOS 4.4 I believe.
>
> 3. FWIW, the cheap PCIe Marvell 88E8053 based NICs from Rosewill
> mentioned earlier do seem to work reliably in Gutsy (although the
> requisite sky2 module is a nightmare on other platforms including Xen).
> I've transfered TB of data both ways with it via NFS in Gutsy with no
> problem other than high CPU usage (see next item).
>
> 4. Both the Marvell and the Nforce hardware can't hold a candle to
> Intel as far as CPU offloading goes. For troubleshooting this problem,
> I used an old 1.8Ghz P4 (single core) system running Feisty with an
> intel 82547EI gigabit adapter on the MB - it never goes above 50% CPU
> usage serving or pulling at 1Gbps - whereas the Marvell and Nforce
> solutions routinely use most of what a 2.1GHz dual core Athlon 64 X2
> system has to offer, just to run iperf! I know I could make this CPU
> usage go down by enabling jumbo frames across the board, but that
> introduces a whole other list of compatibility problems I don't want to
> face.
>
> Long story short - you get what you pay for I guess. It's a shame,
> because the 6 channel SATA2 controller on these Nforce 570 boards seems
> to perform quite nicely and reliably using mdadm and RAID5 or RAID6. If
> the dual nforce LAN worked, the board would be quite a steal for $80 and
> another $80 or so for a fast Athlon X2 proc - but unfortunately, it
> doesn't.
>
> --
> Random pauses when transferring data at gigabit speeds with forcedeth
> driver
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/130075
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>