Hey all, Attached is a dmesg of one of a pair of supermicro based firewalls I recently bought. I had set them up as a CARP/pfsync redundant pair of frontend firewalls for our network. However, after they reached 15,000 interrupts per second (~ 110 megabits of our site traffic), they passed 90% CPU usage through interrupts and stopped being useful.
The machines have two built-in BGE nics. I swapped in an Intel PRO/1000MT Dual Port Server Nic into a PCI-X 133mhz PCI slot, but it made absolutely no difference in the interrupt load. The current firewalls in place are freebsd machines running on supermicro hardware with two em based built-in nics running past 40k interrupts without passing 50% CPU load on interrupts. The only error I can see in the dmesg was this: pcibios0: no compatible PCI ICU found: ICU vendor 0x8086 product 0x2640 pcibios0: Warning, unable to fix up PCI interrupt routing pcibios0: PCI bus #5 is the last bus ... which as far as I can read, is "harmless", but potentially causing higher interrupt load? Any hints as to where I should look next would be great. I'm about to install the latest -current snapshot on the machine to see if there's a recent fix. I'm about 95% sure this is the motherboard we're using: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/P4/E7221/P8SCT.cfm I'll check with the order guy and confirm the PO. There's a 3.4ghz P4 CPU in it, the two built-in nics, and a single PCI-X 133mhz PCI port which I used for the dual port server nic from intel. SATA harddrive for what it's worth. Running OpenBSD 3.7 as a PF firewall. I've tried changing a bunch of BIOS options, disabling interrupts, etc. I haven't compiled my own kernel or built the OS or anything. Thanks, -Dormando [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name of supermicro-dmesg]
