Jaunty 64-bit - sis900 ethernet adapter speed is very slow

[komputes]

On Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit, my sis900 ethernet adapter started recently to be very slow. I'm not sure what triggers it but it seems to work at full speed before loading the graphical desktop. If I boot into recovery mode and run the 'netroot' and 'dpkg' scripts, packages come in at 500 kB/s. In the graphical environment they get pulled in at 16kB/s.

My internet connection speed (from speedtest.net) has dropped from 5+Mb/s down to 0.25 Mb/s. Other computers on the network get full speed, so it is not my ISP. Also, this computer booted on an 8.10 or 9.04 Beta Live CD (without updates) both get full speed.

Hardware: Laptop - Acer Aspire 5002
00:04.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 PCI Fast Ethernet [1039:0900] (rev 91)
        Subsystem: Acer Incorporated [ALI] Device [1025:0083]
        Kernel driver in use: sis900
        Kernel modules: sis900

Sounds like this bug may be related although it uses sis190 on Kubuntu Jaunty 64-bit:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/341444

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

Hi komputes,

Can you capture and attach your dmesg output after you test and confirm the speed has dropped? Just curious if anything is getting logged that may help. You also mentioned the 9.04 Beta LiveCD did not have this issue. Have you tested booting back into the kernel that shipped with the Beta release? I believe it was the 2.6.28-11.37 kernel, but if you still have the Beta LiveCD you could confirm for sure. Assuming it is the 2.6.28-11.37 kernel, see https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/2.6.28-11.37 . If you can confirm this previous kernel doesn't exhibit the issue, it at least narrows down the list of patches to examine. Please let us know your results. Thanks.

[komputes (komputes)]

Hi Leann,

This bug was reported a few weeks ago. Since then I have abandoned 64-bit and have gone back to 32-bit Jaunty which works fine. I would like to test this further to fix this bug, but hopefully without making any changes to the computer. Can you point me to specific LiveCD ISO's you would like me to test. I no longer have the Beta CD as I have recorded over the CD-RW with the final version of Jaunty.

Currently the repositories have 2.6.28-11.42. If you can get me a LiveCD with 2.6.28-11.37 or point me to the linux-image and linux-headers package (if the CD is not available), I would be glad to continue working on this bug. Thank you.

[Leann Ogasawara (leannogasawara)]

If you could, it would be most helpful to test the most recent upstream kernel build, 2.6.31-rc1 as of this posting - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Thanks.

[komputes (komputes)]

I cannot test this any longer as my Acer Aspire 5002 is now broken (AC won't charge battery or feed electricity to laptop).

I would need someone else with the Aspire 3000/5000 model (or someone with an SiS900 NIC) to test this.

[quiricada (raraland)]

jaunty 32 bit 2.6.30-10-generic

nautilus ssh file transfer have always been slow on this particular machine.

right now, am transferring a 1.1gb file on my lan wired connection and am topping out at 521 kb/sec! on a good day, it sometime goes up to 1100 kb/sec!

transfers between other machines on the same lan is at 5 - 8 mb/sec

[PhracturedBlue (pblue)]

jaunty 32 bit 2.6.28-13-generic
connected via LAN to a 32bit hardy machine
cifs, ssh, ftp all top out around 500kB/sec
I can easily get 6-8MB/sec using XP in the same setup
dmesg just says:
eth0: Transmit timeout, status 00000004 00000000
eth0: Media Link on 100mbps dull-duplex
eth0: no IPv6 routers present

[Roel Videler (roel-videler)]

This bug still applies in Karmic Koala, here's my dmesg from the point of failure:

[ 19.219137] irq 19: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
[ 19.219156] Call Trace:
[ 19.219160] <IRQ> [<ffffffff810b53d6>] __report_bad_irq+0x26/0xa0
[ 19.219180] [<ffffffff810b55dc>] note_interrupt+0x18c/0x1d0
[ 19.219186] [<ffffffff810b5c55>] handle_fasteoi_irq+0xd5/0x100
[ 19.219193] [<ffffffff81014c1d>] handle_irq+0x1d/0x30
[ 19.219197] [<ffffffff810140f7>] do_IRQ+0x67/0xe0
[ 19.219204] [<ffffffff81012a13>] ret_from_intr+0x0/0x11
[ 19.219207] <EOI> [<ffffffff8127c1a5>] ? copy_page_c+0x5/0x10
[ 19.219220] [<ffffffff810f466a>] ? __do_fault+0x39a/0x4e0
[ 19.219226] [<ffffffff810f8ab7>] ? handle_mm_fault+0x1a7/0x3c0
[ 19.219233] [<ffffffff81036419>] ? default_spin_lock_flags+0x9/0x10
[ 19.219241] [<ffffffff8152c78a>] ? do_page_fault+0x16a/0x370
[ 19.219249] [<ffffffff8152a105>] ? page_fault+0x25/0x30
[ 19.219252] handlers:
[ 19.219255] [<ffffffffa000e640>] (sis900_interrupt+0x0/0x120 [sis900])
[ 19.219281] Disabling IRQ #19

Seems obvious what goes wrong but i have no idea how to fix this.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Flittermice (flittermice)]

I experience(d) a very similar problem here with Xubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", 32-bit, Kernel 2.6.32-25, SIS 900 chipset in an Asus A2500D notebook, and therefore I landed here:

The network connection was very slow: Maximum downstream of 40 kByte/s.
Not only "internet", but as well internal traffic was affected.
I was not even able to do 2 ssh connections to this machine at the same time.
The boot options "acpi=off", "nolapic" and "noapic" did not make anything better.

I finally solved the issue by adding "irqpoll" to the boot parameters.

/etc/default/grub:
...
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash irqpoll"
...