Hi, I'm getting a lot of dropped packets when I exceed about 400 Mbps (400 Mbps in and 400 Mbps out) on a single network interface. This is a bcm5704-based device. ethtool -S is showing me the rx_discard stat is increasing by exactly the number of packets that have gone missing. My question is, what exactly does this mean? Besides the obvious meaning that the packets were dropped, why exactly is it dropping them? I assume there is some queue on the nic itself that is getting full? I have tried changing the number of rx descriptors up to the maximum value of 511, but to no avail (when I did this with the tg3 driver, it locked up; with the bcm5700 driver, it took the change but the behavior was the same). More info - I am using the stock RedHat 2.4.21-20ELsmp kernel. I am using iptables to NAT the packets before they are forwarded; they aren't being delivered to userspace. The problem does not happen if I drop the data rate down to about 350-360 Mbps. The problem does not happen if I use the 400 Mbps data rate but put the incoming stream on one interface and the outgoing stream on another interface. Thanks Ed - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
