On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Connie Sieh wrote:
There are lots of reports of issues like this for tg3 but most reports end in "did not hear from requester so closing" or "Fedora Core X is not supported any more so closing". Does anyone know of a real solution to this problem. ... We have been experiencing intermittent network failures on systems running SLF47 2.6.9-78.0.1 kernel/tg3 3.86 driver . They waiting for the tcp to finish, which never happens. The failures are load-related. 01:05.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
We have only 3 systems in the Tier-1 centre requiring the tg3 driver; our card model is: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11). We have never seen a problem with it (running SL 4.7 2.6.9-78.0.8.ELsmp)
... The hints we have got thus far is that the new driver v3.86 is trying to implement one of the tcp offload features on the NIC which in the case of the BCM5704 is broken.
I came across this link: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/any-type-of-bittorrent-downloads-kills-linux-network-476368/?s=924f03df77c95c1f9d769fef0253f55a - where they suggested turning off TSO (assuming it is turned on). But I do not think it is turned on by default; at least on our 3 boxes it is off by default (but I suppose the driver turns on/off features depending on the model): # ethtool -k eth0 Offload parameters for eth0: Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported Cannot get device generic segmentation offload settings: Operation not supported rx-checksumming: on tx-checksumming: on scatter-gather: on tcp segmentation offload: off udp fragmentation offload: off generic segmentation offload: off # grep eth0 /var/log/dmesg divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0 eth0: Tigon3 [partno(BCM95721) rev 4101 PHY(5750)] (PCI Express) 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet 00:14:22:7b:7c:34 eth0: RXcsums[1] LinkChgREG[0] MIirq[0] ASF[1] WireSpeed[1] TSOcap[1] eth0: dma_rwctrl[76180000] dma_mask[64-bit] If any tcp offload features are suspected, have you tried turning them off? i.e. ethtool -K eth0 sg off rx off tx off cheers, etc. -- deatrich @ triumf.ca, Science/Atlas PH: +1 604-222-7665 <*> This moment's fortune cookie: The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the pavement is precisely 1 bananosecond.
