em driver packet loss in 6.2 amd64 (RELEASE and STABLE)

[Rob Watt]

Nevermind. After some more research it seems that we were having problems 
with the risers cards on some of our servers. I will do some more testing 
after the riser cards are replaced to see if we still have multicast drops 
when using 6.2. Most likely it was purely a hardware problem. Since it was 
the same exact behavior that we saw with the earlier version of the em 
driver I figured it was the same bug resurfacing again.

-
Rob Watt

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Rob Watt wrote:

> Hi,
>
> In 6.1-RELEASE there were a number of em driver stability and performance 
> issues. We would regularly see packet loss at low to moderate load. A number 
> of patches were applied that completely fixed the problem for us.
>
> We installed 6.2-RELEASE, but even though 6.2 is supposed to have a stable em 
> driver, we are noticing the same packet loss problem again. We updated to 
> STABLE, and we didn't see any packet drops in our first day of testing, but 
> today we are seeing packet drops again.
>
> Has anyone else experienced this? Are there known problems with the STABLE em 
> driver?
>
> Our hardware:
>
>  tyan s5372 motherboard (bios v1.05)
>  2 intel x5355 processors
>  adaptec aic7902 scsi daughter card
>  there are 4 em interfaces (2 on-board, 2 from an add-on card), but we
>    are currently only using em0
>
> We have experienced the packet drop problem with a custom kernel and with the 
> RELEASE SMP kernel.
>
> -
> Rob Watt
>