Bug#615860: bnx2 adapter periodically dropping received packets (pause frames)

[Joerg Morbitzer <jomo@morbitzer.de>]

On 02/28/2011 03:14 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-02-28 at 14:22 +0100, Joerg Morbitzer wrote:
>> Package: bnx2
>> Version: 2.6.32-5-amd64
>> Severity: normal
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> on my two Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) servers from HP (ProLiant DL380 G7) I have
>> issues with the on-board Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit 
>> Ethernet adapters: they constantly drop received network packets, and the
>> Cisco routing swtich 4948 is reporting pause frames coming from the
>> network card during this time.
>>
>> I found the exact same bug report description including an upstream fix
>> by David Miller here :
> 
> I think that's a different bug.  And I don't see any fix by David Miller
> there.

Hi Ben,

thanks for your replay. I thought there was an upstream fix due to this
answer from Andy Gospodarek (Comment 30 in the Red Hat bug report).

> 
>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=640026
>>
>> They increased the ring buffer size as far as I understand. 
> [...]
> 
> They increased the maximum allowed RX descriptor ring size.  You should
> first try changing the value to the current maximum yourself, with
> ethtool -C.

Ok, thanks for the hint with "ethtool -G", I will try to increase the RX
value from 255 to the maximum of 1020.

Kind regards, Joerg.