On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:27:57AM -0800, Murray wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mar 10, 12:55 pm, Pasi Kärkkäinen <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 02:26:51PM -0800, Murray wrote:
> > > We've got a
> >
> > > Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12)
> > > centos 5.4
> > > iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.871-0.12.el5_4.1
> >
> > > I've been trying without success to make the iscsi mounts stop
> > > disconnecting like clockwork after about 10-24 hours. When it works,
> > > the performance is fantastic, blazing fast. However, we need it to
> > > work for more than 24 hours in a row. Apparently, this may be due to
> > > problems with the bnx and bnx2i driver. We're looking at buying a new
> > > network card that will work with iscsi reliably. At this point, the
> > > thought is to just change the hardware. The Broadcom support seems
> > > dubious at best.
> >
> > > Would anyone in the iscsi community recommend a network card and a
> > > module that they know works reliably with centos5.x?
> >
> > 1. Does removing bnx2i help? ie. try using the plain normal tcp transport 
> > without broadcom hw accel.
> >
> > 2. if the above helps, then you could try updating to the latest RHEL 5.5 
> > beta kernel + iscsi-utils,
> >    those have bugfixes for bnx2i.
> >
> > -- Pasi
> 
> While modinfo reports that bnx2i is the iscsi driver for this card, /
> var/log/messages reports otherwise.
> What seems to happen is that the system attempts to load the bnx2i
> module, fails and then falls back to bnx2. This was when I had forced
> eth1 to use bnx2i via /etc/modprobe.conf :
> 

I don't think you should add bnx2i in modprobe.conf for ethX..

> Mar  8 17:51:37 ndsfdh1 kernel: iscsi: registered transport (bnx2i)
> Mar  8 17:52:48 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2: eth1: using MSI
> Mar  8 17:52:48 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2i: iSCSI not supported, dev=eth1
> Mar  8 17:52:50 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2i: iSCSI not supported, dev=eth1
> Mar  8 17:52:51 ndsfdh1 kernel: bnx2: eth1 NIC Copper Link is Up, 1000
> Mbps full
> 
> So, from what I can tell it uses the bnx2 driver. Disconnects follow
> within hours which require the raid array itself to be rebooted before
> another successful iscsi login can be made. Is that what you mean by
> "using plain normal tcp transport without broadcom hw accel"?
> Admittedly, I am not sure how to prove I am using "plain normal tcp
> transport". Or should I completely remove bnx2i somehow? I don't see
> the module loaded, but the disconnects happen anyway.
> 

bnx2 is the ethernet nic driver, while bnx2i is additional driver
that provides iscsi hardware acceleration when used with open-iscsi.

if there's no bnx2i module loaded then you're using the normal/plain 
tcp transport for iscsi.

> My colleague suggested just getting another card and trying something
> known to work, perhaps cheaper than trying to get the broadcom stuff
> to work.
> 
> It's not clear to me the relationship between the two modules. Are
> they dependent or should they be loaded independently or just one and
> not the other? Can/should one run bnx2i on one interface and bnx2 on
> the other?
> 

from open-iscsi iscsiadm you can see what transport (tcp or bnx2i) 
you're using for your iscsi sessions.

-- Pasi

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