Bug#572201: Further queries

[stephen mulcahy <smulcahy@atlanticlinux.ie>]

Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 05:20:32PM +0000, stephen mulcahy wrote:
> All pause frames should be dropped, either by the hardware or the driver.
> So it's not unexpected that these are equal.

Ok, thanks for the clarification.

> It might be interesting to see what happens if you disable pause frame
> handling with this command:
>
>     ethtool -A eth0 autoneg off rx off tx off

I tried this and re-ran my hadoop test and I'm seeing the same drop-outs 
 from systems as with this enabled. Running ethtool -S eth0 on a 
dropped out system gives the following output.

NIC statistics:
     tx_bytes: 45900034824
     tx_zero_rexmt: 40968086
     tx_one_rexmt: 0
     tx_many_rexmt: 0
     tx_late_collision: 0
     tx_fifo_errors: 0
     tx_carrier_errors: 0
     tx_excess_deferral: 0
     tx_retry_error: 0
     rx_frame_error: 0
     rx_extra_byte: 0
     rx_late_collision: 0
     rx_runt: 0
     rx_frame_too_long: 0
     rx_over_errors: 0
     rx_crc_errors: 0
     rx_frame_align_error: 0
     rx_length_error: 0
     rx_unicast: 42104294
     rx_multicast: 897
     rx_broadcast: 564
     rx_packets: 42105755
     rx_errors_total: 0
     tx_errors_total: 0
     tx_deferral: 0
     tx_packets: 40968086
     rx_bytes: 48159336484
     tx_pause: 0
     rx_pause: 0
     rx_drop_frame: 0
     tx_unicast: 3322
     tx_multicast: 4392
     tx_broadcast: 23998478524

and no messages in the system logs.

These systems are running with DHCP (and have Avahi installed) - is it 
possible these are related to the problem (but again, why is it only 
showing up when running the 2.6.32 kernel).

> I can't see any major changes in the forcedeth driver since 2.6.30.

I scanned what changelogs I could find also and nothing jumped out at me 
that could be the cause of this.

> We will shortly update the official kernel packages to incorporate this
> release, so you could just wait a day or two and update.  However I'm not
> aware of any changes in 2.6.32.10 that would fix this sort of bug.

Again, I scanned the changelogs and nothing jumped out at me. I'll try 
the updated package when you release it to see if it makes a difference.

Let me know if there's any further testing I can do before I roll the 
systems back to 2.6.30 and put them back into production.

Thanks,

-stephen

--
Stephen Mulcahy     Atlantic Linux         http://www.atlanticlinux.ie
Registered in Ireland, no. 376591 (144 Ros Caoin, Roscam, Galway)