Re: 24 lost ticks with 2.6.20.10 kernel

From: Kok, Auke
Date: Tue May 01 2007 - 18:09:13 EST


Michel Lespinasse wrote:
(I've added the E1000 maintainers to the thread as I found the issue
seems to go away after I compile out that driver. For reference, I was
trying to figure out why I lose exactly 24 ticks about every two
seconds, as shown with report_lost_ticks. This is with a DQ965GF
motherboard with onboard E1000).

that's perfectly likely. The main issue is that we read the hardware stats every two seconds and that can consume quite some time. It's strange that you are losing that many ticks IMHO, but losing one or two might very well be.

We've been playing with all sorts of solutions to this problem and haven't come up with a way to reduce the load of the system reading HW stats, and it remains the most likely culprit, allthough I don't rule out clean routines just yet. This could very well be exaggerated at 100mbit speeds as well, I never looked at that.

I've had good results with 2.6.21.1 (even running tickless :)) on these NICs. Have you tried that yet?

Auke
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