Re: [PATCH] Re: rtl8169 problem and 2.4.23

From: Daniel Egger
Date: Fri Feb 20 2004 - 09:13:01 EST


On Jan 25, 2004, at 11:07 pm, Francois Romieu wrote:

Try the patch above. If it compiles, it should fix the stats and you get a
bugfix as an extra.

Sorry for the delay. I've not had the chance to recompile the kernel
for my fileserver and restart it, yet. But in the meantime I've received
another card with RTL8169S and tried it in a different machine.

The current driver in 2.4.24 and 2.6.3 will lock up the box in almost
no time when under load (not a real kernel lockup but a soft one because
the machine is running over NFS and the driver seems to lose packets
and then rejects to transfer more). Your patch fixes this problem and the
counter issue for both 2.4.24 and 2.6.3, so it probably should go in ASAP.

However there's another thing bugging me: abysmal performance. In both
a switched and a direct environment the best I could get using netio
was 10MB/s send and 21MB/s receive, using NFS I get just under 10MB/s,
this is slower than with a 8139 el cheapo 100Mbit card.

The netio results are illogical anyway because the other side is the
fileserver, which has the same card, so if one end receives 21MB/s the
other end has to send equally as fast, no? :) The CPU utilization was
almost zero on server and client (both Athlon XP).

Servus,
Daniel

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