Question about bce driver

[Tom Judge]

Gary Palmer wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 10:31:41AM +0100, Tom Judge wrote:
>> Julian Elischer wrote:
>>> Tom Judge wrote:
>>>> Josh Paetzel wrote:
>>>>> On Wednesday 11 July 2007, Tom Judge wrote:
>>>>>> Hi Paul,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> From the testing that I have been doing for the last few months
>>>>>> the driver in 6.2 is stable if you are not using jumbo frames and
>>>>>> there is a light-moderate network load.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> However if you want to use Jumbo frames the driver is very
>>>>>> unstable.  I posted a patch against 6.2 which should fix some load
>>>>>> based issues in the driver with standard frame sizes.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Tom
>>>>> Paul, I was never able to solve the link up/link down problems with 
>>>>> the driver....I was using the drivers from STABLE for a while, and 
>>>>> without jumbo frames everything worked somewhat ok most of the 
>>>>> time....the ultimate solution was to just get the intel PCI-X card 
>>>>> and stop using the broadcoms.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> We have basically come to the same conclusion today,  unfortunately 
>>>> this is 35 machines, but if it makes them stable at least we can use 
>>>> them.
>>> I'm not seeing any problems on our 2950s running 6.1 plus some backpatches.
> 
>> I am very surprised at that. The driver in 6.1 was un-usable in our 
>> environment. 6.2 makes it usable with standard frames under moderate 
>> load. However use jumbo frames and it all falls apart, and unfortunately
>> the network these systems are plugged into is GigE only with a 8192 
>> Jumbo mtu.
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised if you were running different rev motherboards.
> Although the Dell chassis/model number is the same, they frequently rev
> the motherboard without any externally visible changes.  I'd be more
> surprised if you had the same mobo part number and PCI ID's for the
> Broadcom chips.
> 
> Gary

I have systems with 2 different revisions of the broadcom chip on them, 
both revisions have show the same symptoms.  Please see my posts in 
thread "Problems with BCE network adapter (Dell PE2950)" you will find 
full details of the chip revisions that I have tested with.

Tom