Re: My boss want to kill debian, please help !
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, George Alexandru Dragoi wrote:
> Thanks a lot, hmm, i always thought vanilla kernel are best, i will
No, they're not... Too many unfixed bugs.
BTW, make damn sure you enable nmi_watchdog=1 on the kernel boot line, and
also compile in the tco_810 module and use the watchdog program with it. At
least the machine will try to panic if a CPU gets stuck, AND it *will*
reboot if it ever locks up.
> Now this is the debian system (with e1000 , not a typo):
> 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82875P Memory Controller Hub (rev 02)
So far so good. Which motherboard? Intel D875PBZ, or another (*which?*)? I
have four D875PBZ on production running as routers, so if it is a D875PBZ I
can help you a bit more. If it is a D875PBZ, which BIOS revision?
DMI information will tell you what board you have, and on most good boards,
the serial number and BIOS version too. There are packages in Debian (sarge
at least) to display the BIOS DMI information.
> 0000:02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82547EI Gigabit Ethernet
> Controller (LOM)
Good. This is your best giga-ether port (the onboard one). If you have to
deliver a huge number of packets somewhere, use this one first. It has a
dedicated bus to the northbridge, and won't hog the PCI bus at all.
> 0000:03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro
> 100] (rev 08)
Ah, the PCI ones are e100, not e1000. Make sure you use the e100 driver,
not the eepro100 one.
Here I used PCI 3C905B NICs (five per machine), which I am phasing out and
switching to e1000 ones (for fast ethernet work, not gigabit work). The
hardware interrupt mitigation assistance of the e1000 make things MUCH
easier to the system as a whole. With 5 of them plus the onboard e1000,
well, that's pretty much a requirement on these machines for best
performance.
The 3COMs are losing packets (but the machine is rock solid, even when I
saturated all PCI NICs at 200mb/s traffic during a 8h burning test). At
non-trivial loads, they lose packets... But the switch just resends them,
and all is well (it is not causing a bottleneck yet, packet loss is less
than 0.1%). The kernel gets pretty verbose at the ammount of time the 3c59x
driver hogs inside the interrupt handlers, though.
Keep that in mind for your next machine, buying e1000 for fast-ethernet work
often is a very good idea (instead of using e100s or anything else).
> model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz
If this is a Intel D875PBZ, make sure you read the errata about the heatsink
and the AVR on the motherboard with high-clocked processors -- you need a
omnidirectional heatsink. And you might want to apply BIOS P33 too (it
helped at least one of my boxes).
> I want to mention that on the debian system i put the netfilter realm
> match from patch-o-matic-ng .
Well, I have no experience with that patch. It might be solid, or it might
not :(
At least you're not using IMQ or other insanely unstable thing, though.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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