Question about bce driver

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Thursday, July 12, 2007 15:10:31 -0700 David Christensen 
<davidch at broadcom.com> wrote:
>
> I'm sorry I haven't been able to get to the root of your problems
> Tom.  My biggest challenge is trying to duplicate the a loaded system
> which seems to be an important component of the failure you're seeing.
> Simply blasting traffic with netperf hasn't been much of a challenge
> as it runs over the weekend at line rate without a hiccup.  If
> anyone has an idea on how to load the system (which means regular
> failures by the driver to allocate mbufs) I'd definitely appreciate
> hearing it so that I can duplicate Tom's environment.  It's certainly
> important to me that the driver perform well and I won't stop looking
> at the problem if you do decide to jump ship.
>
Dave, perhaps you could answer my question?

I'm using the 0.9.6 driver with 6.1 RELEASE.  I don't use jumbo frames, so 
the only problem I've experienced is the link state going up and down 
occasionally.

Does the more current driver solve the link state problem?  If it does, can 
I use it on 6.1 merely by replacing the three files included with it?  Or 
are there includes that refer to other libraries that have changed since 
6.1?

Am I better off upgrading the entire system to 6.2?  (I prefer not to do 
this, because I have to take the site down to do so.  Patching files and 
rebuilding world and kernel only takes the box out of service during the 
reboots.

-- 
Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Senior Information Security Analyst
The University of Texas at Dallas
http://www.utdallas.edu/ir/security/