On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 07:50:32AM +0200, Manfred Spraul wrote: > Hi Willy, > > Willy Tarreau wrote: > > >I started from the latest backport you sent in september (0.42) and > >incrementally applied 2.6 updates. I stopped at 0.50 which provides > >VLAN support, because after this one, there are some 2.4-incompatible > >changes (64bit consistent memory allocation for rings, and MSI/MSIX > >support). > > > > > > > I agree, 2.4 needs a backport. Either a full backport as you did, or a > minimal one-liner fix. > Right now, the driver is not usable due to an incorrect initialization. > Or to be more accurate: > # modprobe > # ifup > works. > But > # modprobe > # ifup > # ifdown > # ifup > causes a misconfiguration, and the nic hangs hard after a few MB. And > recent distros do the equivalent of ifup/ifdown/ifup somewhere in the > initialization.
That's what I read in one of the changelogs, but I'm not sure at all that it's what happened, because I had the problem after an ifup only. What I was doing with this box was pure performance tests which drew me to compare the broadcom and nforce performance. My tests measured 3 creteria : - number of HTTP/1.0 hits/s - maximum data rate - maximum packets/s on tg3, I got around 45 khits/s, 949 Mbps (TCP, =1.0 Gbps on wire) and 1.05 Mpps receive (I want to build a high speed load-balancer and a sniffer). This was stable. On the nforce, I tried with the hits/s first because it's a good indication of hardware-based and driver-based optimizations. It reached 18 khits/s with a lot of difficulty and the machine was stuck at 100% of one CPU. But it ran for a few minutes like this. Then I tried data rate (which is the same test with 1MB objects), and it failed after about 2 seconds and few megabytes (or hundreds of megabytes) transferred. I had to reboot to get it to work again. And I'm fairly sure that I did not do down/up this time as well, but the test came to the same end. That's why I'm not sure at all that the one-liner will be enough. Moreover, after the update, I reached the same performance as with the broadcom, with a slight improvement on packet reception (1.09 Mpps), and low CPU usage (15%). So basically, the upgrade rendered the driver from barely usable for SSH to very performant. > Marcelo: Do you need a one-liner, or could you apply a large backport > patch? I would really vote for the full backport, and I can break it into pieces if needed (I have them at hand, just have to re-inject the changelogs). However, I have separate changes from 0.42 to 0.50, because I started with your 0.30-0.42 backport patch. I have this machine till the end of the week, so I can perform other tests if you're interested in trying specific things. > -- > Manfred Cheers, Willy - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
