Messages in this thread | | | From | (Larry McVoy) | Subject | Re: Thread+network crashes in 2.0/2.1 | Date | Sat, 28 Feb 1998 22:18:38 -0800 |
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: >On Sat, 28 Feb 1998, Linus Torvalds wrote: : >> : >> In particular, I'd suggest trying the Intel EtherExpress Pro 100B if you : >> need 100Mbps networking: it happens to be what I have, and it has been : >> extremely stable here at Transmeta (the de4x5 cards we used before that : >> were stable but had very bad noise problems over the cable that resulted : >> in bad performance for everybody on the same net, so we ended up chucking : >> them out the window: the problem seemed to be with the 21140 chip iself as : >> we tried different cards with the same chip and we tried both drivers with : >> the same results). : > : > Did this happen to manifest itself as 'Oversized packet ....' : > messages ? I am keenly interested in the possibility . : > although I am not using de4x5 cards , I am using the Kingston : > variant here. At present not at 100mbps. : : No, the problems we had with the 21140 was that our routers reported : excessive number of "runt" packets - there seemed to be something fishy : with the collision handling of the cards or similar. The Linux machines : themselves never reported anything really wrong, they just showed bad : performance. : : It seemed to be mainly an issue when the network was under heavy load : anyway (the cards seemed fine when load was low), and then it just got : really bad rather quickly. We haven't seen the same kinds of problems : with the eepro100 cards.
I can add some more data to this. I believe that the tulip (21140) cards are very sensitive to cable quality and also that the cards vary in quality even with in the same vendor/production run. Why, I have no idea. But I routinely write and run tests to stress these cards (see bw_tcp.c in lmbench, for example), and I've seen both excellent and awful performance from pairs of tulip cards. I typically run in point to point mode as well as full duplex, but I've tested through hubs as well as p-p in half duplex. With a bad card in the mix it is virtually impossible to break 6MB/sec. The problems don't seem to show up under light load at all, except for maybe a delay sometimes when I rlogin to another machine (I haven't figured out if that is a tulip or a linux problem).
Anyway, I concur with both points made by Linus: the tulip cards are flakey under load and the eepro cards seem much better. It's too bad, I liked the tulip cards when they came out, but they haven't stood up as time has passed. Intel wins again. Sigh. Actually, only half a sigh, Intel builds pretty nice stuff.
--lm
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