em driver, 82574L chip, and possibly ASPM

[Ivan Voras]

On 11/23/10 14:03, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> On 11/23/2010 7:47 AM, Ivan Voras wrote:
>> It looks like I'm unfortunate enough to have to deploy on a machine
>> which has the 82574L Intel NIC chip on a Supermicro X8SIE-F board, which
>> apparently has hardware issues, according to this thread:
>>
>> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2908463&group_id=42302&atid=447449
>>
>>
>
> Interesting, this is the same nic that has been giving me grief! Mine is
> on an Intel server board (S3420GPX). The symptoms are VERY similar to
> what the LINUX user sees as well with RX errors and the traffic patterns.

I've posted detailed info on this NIC in the thread "em card wedging" - 
can you compare it with yours?

The whole thing looks very sensitive to BIOS settings. I've just toggled 
something that looked unrelated (don't remember what, I've been toggling 
BIOS settings all day) and the machine has been doing a flood-ping for 
20 minutes without wedging (which doesn't mean it won't wedge as soon as 
I send this message, it did such things before).

One other thing, I don't know if this is normal as I've only just 
noticed it: flood-pinging a machine (also a FreeBSD machine, on the same 
switch) and monitoring the packet rates with netstat I see that the 
rates begin at something like 8,000 PPS (in either direction) and then 
slowly over a timespan of 5-10 minutes climb to 100,000 PPS (again, in 
either direction).

Since this is gigabit LAN with a Cisco switch, I'd say the 100,000 PPS 
should be correct. The other machine I'm pinging also has an em card but 
a "desktop class" one. Is this slow-start expected / normal?