Sundance vs. VT8233A; 2.2 vs. 2.4
I hope someone on this list can offer a little insight or assistance in
regards to my situation.
In the past I've always used FreeBSD for my servers, but I decided to
try out Linux. In evaluating the distros, I've come to the conclusion
that Debian is for me. I'm not going to get into a review here, so lets
get to my problem.
I put together a box from various parts my client had available. The
machine I put together has a Via KT333 mobo, an ATA100 80GB disk and a
D-Link DFE-530 TXS nic. The client needs this server to store and
exchange ~100MB files. There won't be many concurrent users but they
would like to have transfers be as quick as possible. Here's what I
tried with Debian 3.0:
First I tried a 2.2 idepci install and found that with some hdparm
tweaking I'd see ~40MB/sec (which is plenty). Downloads from the server
were pretty fast, uploads were ridiculously slow. (30K/minute!) I
traced the problem to the NIC running in 10baseTx half-duplex whereas
the client machines are all 100BaseTx-FD and I was seeing tons of errors
on the Debian box's eth0. I had the sundance module loaded and tried
playing with mii-tool but nothing would get the NIC to switch modes.
The problem as I see it (and dmesg reports) is that the NIC's mii
controller wasn't being detected/loaded.
So I decided that the hardware in this box meant a bf2.4 kernel was more
appropriate. I installed 2.4 and the NIC was correctly detected, and
operating at full speed. However, now hdparm can't set the drive into
udma5. I configured a new 2.4 kernel with the vt82xxx.c driver but that
still didn't correct the problem. VIA offers ATA-133 patches for RH,
Mandrake, and Suse, so I played with the 2.4.18 source and the patches
but still had no luck. I've also tried using lilo to force the kernel
to use ata66 on ide0, but that failed. I know the cable is nice short
80 wire (I get great performance in 2.2) and the NIC/cables all work
fine too...
So my question is which problem do I tackle? The NIC not working in 2.2
idepci or the VIA southbridge in 2.4? I'd really appreciate any help
the list can offer.
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