High interrupts w/ Cisco 350 card

[Peter Jeremy]

On Tue, 2005-Sep-20 19:44:07 -0400, Peter D. Quilty wrote:
>I'm running 5.4-RELEASE-p6 on a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop.  My network
>card is a Cisco 350 PCMCIA card.  I'm experiencing a very high rate of
>interrupts during heavy network traffic.

Not quite.  "vmstat -i" reports 173 interrupts/sec.  That's not high.
"systat -iostat" shows a ludicrously high interrupt load though.

I notice that almost all the hardware on your laptop maps to irq 11 -
that's undesirable.  Can you convince your BIOS to use different
interrupt mappings?

>  This Cisco card works fine in every other laptop I have.

What OS?

>  I suspect it might be a cardbus problem, but I don't
>know how to resolve it or troubleshoot it any further.

The PCCard bus is fairly atrocious (basically ISA) but isn't that bad.
I can get roughly wire speed from a 10baseT NIC without serious CPU
strain on a P-233 laptop.

Have you tried anything other that FreeBSD 5.4 on your Tecra?

>interrupt                          total       rate
...
>irq11: cbb0 cbb1+++              6773905        173
...
>          /0   /10  /20  /30  /40  /50  /60  /70  /80  /90  /100
>cpu  user|XXXXX
>     nice|
>   system|X
>interrupt|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
>     idle|XXX
...
>cbb0: <ToPIC100 PCI-CardBus Bridge> at device 11.0 on pci2
>cardbus0: <CardBus bus> on cbb0
>pccard0: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb0
>cbb1: <ToPIC100 PCI-CardBus Bridge> at device 11.1 on pci2
>cardbus1: <CardBus bus> on cbb1
>pccard1: <16-bit PCCard bus> on cbb1
...
>an0: <Cisco Systems 350 Series Wireless LAN Adapter> at port 0xc000-0xc03f irq 11 function 0 config 5 on pccard0
>an0: got RSSI <-> dBM map
>an0: supported rates: 1Mbps 2Mbps 5.5Mbps 11Mbps
>an0: Ethernet address: 00:07:0e:b9:2e:d5

-- 
Peter Jeremy