According to the 6.2-beta3 announcemetn, there are improvements to the em driver. "The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). " I have a Sun X4100 which uses Intel ethernet. I would like to install amd64 6.2beta3 on this server and put it through some tests. But I have no idea what tests to run or how to run them. Can someone provide some pointers? I am happy to post my findings. thanks, ke han
If memory serves me right, ke han wrote:> According to the 6.2-beta3 announcemetn, there are improvements to > the em driver. > > "The most important of the things that have been worked on is the > driver for em(4). " > > I have a Sun X4100 which uses Intel ethernet. I would like to > install amd64 6.2beta3 on this server and put it through some tests. > But I have no idea what tests to run or how to run them. > Can someone provide some pointers? I am happy to post my findings.There were a number of problems in em(4) that appeared post-6.1. A new version of the em(4) driver was merged to the RELENG_6 branch just prior to 6.2-BETA3. That version is better, but still has some unresolved issues (problems have been reported with jumbo frames and with watchdog timeouts). There's a new patch by jfv@ in an email a few days ago (with subject "New em patch for 6.2 BETA 3") that might fix these problems. It might be worthwhile to try this out. Basically, just look around the archives of stable@ to see discussions of the em driver over the past month or so. I believe that a number of prior problems were uncovered when people just tried to push a lot of traffic through the interface. Bruce. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 249 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20061106/c87e6540/signature.pgp
Hello! On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 04:55:50AM +0800, ke han wrote:> I have a Sun X4100 which uses Intel ethernet. I would like to > install amd64 6.2beta3 on this server and put it through some tests. > But I have no idea what tests to run or how to run them. > Can someone provide some pointers? I am happy to post my findings.Put some CPU load on the machine, e.g. by running cd /usr/src sh while true do make -j4 buildworld done >mk.log on one terminal and then transfer some data to the system, e.g. by fetch(1)ing via FTP from another box connected to the same LAN. On all systems I have, there is no need to saturate the Gbit-Link. 100 Mbit/s local connection will trigger the problem, too. If the problem exists on your system, you will see emN - watchdog timeout messages on the console and in /var/log/messages, followed by a reset of the interface and a short and recoverable, but complete, loss of connectivity. A couple of seconds, maybe. This is enough to frustrate people, who e.g. run large backup jobs over a single TCP connection that takes a couple of hours to complete - the interface reset aborts the backup :-/ I must say that it seems to me, these guys are putting a hell of a lot of effort into this problem and "we" are making progress. Things look quite good to me for 6.2-RELEASE. HTH, Patrick -- punkt.de GmbH Internet - Dienstleistungen - Beratung Vorholzstr. 25 Tel. 0721 9109 -0 Fax: -100 76137 Karlsruhe http://punkt.de