High interrupts w/ Cisco 350 card

[Joao Barros]

On 9/22/05, Peter D. Quilty <pdquilty at adelphia.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 18:01 +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
>
> > 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?
>
>
>
> No, the PCI bus is hardcoded to use only irqs 10 & 11.  The video card
> uses 10 and everything else shares 11.
>
>
> > >  This Cisco card works fine in every other laptop I have.
> >
> > What OS?
>
>
>
> All are running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE.
>
>
> > >  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?
>
>
>
> No, I haven't.  It is my primary laptop and I would prefer not to have
> to load another OS merely for testing.
>
>
> > >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
> > ...
>

I also have an Cisco Aironet 350 and the only time I had such an issue
was connecting to a  WPA enabled AP and a recent (couple of months)
firmware update from Cisco corrected this issue.
Given that you're using 5.4 and WPA is only coming out in 6.0 I know
this is a long shot but I would try updating the firmware of the card.
Heck, every update I do gives me more speed and stability :)

--
Joao Barros