Hi Martin,
I am not sure if what you experienced is consistent with my encounters:
1) I have been having this nfs problem before I upgrade to debian
kernel when I was using slugOS 2.6.17 (or is it 2.6.16 - can't remember
now!) kernel (debootsrapped etch),
which supposedly uses Intel's driver.
2) I don't have any problems using samba now on debian's kernel 2.6.18
(the open source driver) when transferring the same files that cause
nfs to break.
So, being an open source driver bug does not explain this behavior.
- Ahmad
Martin Michlmayr wrote:
retitle 404447 ixp4xx: open source network driver behavingly badly under load, can cause corruption
severity 404447 important
thanks
Hi Ahmad,
I've tested various combinations now and I'm pretty sure this is a
problem with the open source Ethernet driver for the IXP4xx platform.
I've tested:
- NFS on another ARM platform, namely IOP32x: it works fine.
- 2.6.18-2 on NSLU2 to rule out the mm/msync patches: it works fine.
- 2.6.17 on NSLU2 using the Intel Ethernet driver: it works fine.
In 2.6.18 we have switched to a different Ethernet driver. Various
people have experienced problems when transferring large amounts of
data with this driver, and given my tests I'm pretty sure that this is
what we're seeing in this case too. Some people have suggested that
setting
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_wmem="4096 8092 8092"
helps. Unfortunately, I still see NFS problems so it doesn't
completely get rid of the problems.
The bottom line is that this is a known bug in the Ethernet driver.
I'll ask the author of that driver whether he looked into these
problems already. I hope this can be resolved in time for etch but
I'm not sure this will really happen. In any case, I'm downgrading
this bug because Debian itself doesn't include the microcode needed
for IXP4xx Ethernet, so this isn't a release critical bug for Debian.
However, I still hope we can find a solution.
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