Re: tg3 bad performance, lots of hardware interrupts

[Harald Hannelius <harald@iki.fi>]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Harald Hannelius wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Jiri Kosina wrote:
>> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Michael Chan wrote:
>
>>> Something is very wrong.  ethtool -t should only take a few seconds to
>>> complete.  You can try ethtool -t eth0 online to reduce the number of
>>> tests to see if it makes a difference.
>>> How many of these NICs do you have?  If you have more than one, do they
>>> all behave the same way?  Have they ever worked well before?
>> 
>> Harald, is the IRQ of eth0 shared with any other device? (cat
>> /proc/interrupts will show).
>
> # cat /proc/interrupts
>           CPU0       CPU1
>  0:        111          1   IO-APIC-edge      timer
>  1:          0          2   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
>  2:          0          0    XT-PIC-XT        cascade
>  5:          0          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   sata_nv
>  7:        856         51   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ohci_hcd:usb2
> 10:          0          3   IO-APIC-fasteoi   sata_nv, ehci_hcd:usb1
> 11:       4305          7   IO-APIC-fasteoi   sata_nv
> 12:          0          4   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
> 216:       4217     128932   PCI-MSI-edge      eth2
> 217:     161107     685351   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0
> NMI:          0          0   Non-maskable interrupts
> LOC:    2380762    2619917   Local timer interrupts
> RES:       3000       3269   Rescheduling interrupts
> CAL:         16         31   function call interrupts
> TLB:         64        111   TLB shootdowns
> TRM:          0          0   Thermal event interrupts
> SPU:          0          0   Spurious interrupts
> ERR:          1
> MIS:          0
>
> Well, shared or not, yes and no. I think that /proc/interrupts contains 
> soft-interrupts. The problem child is interface eth2.
>
> As rapported by ifconfig the interface is on IRQ 5:
>
> # ifconfig eth2
> eth2      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:10:18:30:E6:D6
>          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>          RX packets:196898 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>          TX packets:19 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>          RX bytes:69887991 (66.6 MiB)  TX bytes:1216 (1.1 KiB)
>          Interrupt:5
>
> That'd be the same as sata_nv.
>
> # ifconfig eth2
> eth2      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:10:18:30:E6:D6
>          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>          RX packets:196898 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
>          TX packets:19 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>          RX bytes:69887991 (66.6 MiB)  TX bytes:1216 (1.1 KiB)
>          Interrupt:5
>
> I changed the settings "PnP OS" in the BIOS (acpi on/off?) and tried booting 
> with both pci=routeirq (or smth like that, see original post) on and off to 
> no avail.
>
> I'm stumped. I have never experienced anything quite like this before. 
> Usually an IRQ-conflict has crashed my computers, not just slowed them down 
> (or maybe these dual-core opterons are just that incredibly fast nowadays 
> that the do nothing incredibly fast :) ). Then again, I haven't had an 
> IRQ-conflict on my boxen in years.
>
> Buggy motherboard? Buggy NIC? The motherboard has the latest available BIOS 
> as per supermicro's webpage.
>
> I'm getting three PCIe e1000's next week, I'll try with these instead.

For the record, I popped in a couple of PCI-express e1000's and they work 
flawlessly. It's either the interaction between those HP-cards and the 
motherboard, or something with the tg3 driver, I suppose.

Funny though, that e1000e didn't detect the cards, but e1000 did.

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