Re: NFS/MOUNT/sunrpc problem?

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 04:41:31PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Mer, 2003-09-10 at 15:37, Marco Bertoncin - Sun Microsystems UK -
> Platform OS Development Engineer wrote:
> > - PXE booting x86 'headless' blades (2.0 Ghz 2P Xeon) to install RedHat 8.0 
> > (kernel 2.4.18).
> 
> Update the kernel once installed, the 2.4.18- kernels are obsoleted by
> other security fixes
> 
> > - the blade, after 3 seconds, starts a storm of retransmit (MOUNT reqs) that 
> > won't stop, unless an ACK (one of the several ACKS sent for each retransmitted 
> > requests) has the chance to get through. This is sometimes after a few hundreds 
> > packets, sometimes after a lot more, causing an apparent hang of the 
> > installation process, and what's even worse, bringing to a grinding halt the  
> > server (bombarded by near 1Gbit/sec packets).
> 
> I've seen one other report of this (with a via chip),

FWIW, on my Via EPIA (pre-Nehemiah C3) Wal-Mart box, I see NFS (?) bugs
as well.  I can mount just fine and do an 'ls' of a remote dir... but
any attempt to actually transfer data causes the entire mount to hang in
disk wait.

I swapped out NICs several times (and verified the NICs in other boxes)
but can reproduce this behavior quite easily.

ssh, ftp, and other services work flawlessly... it's just NFS.

I even tried tcp instead of udp, to no avail.

	Jeff, inevitably lacking time to track things down