Vik> But, when you start transferring high volume traffic over this
Vik> NIC, that driver seems to stop transmitting and/or receiving
Vik> packets. And then you're out of business ;-)
Vik> service network stop ; modprobe -r module ; service network start
Vik> And everything works again for a while. Bottom line is that the
Vik> module for this NIC is not stable.
Ron> I've lately noticed similar problems with high system loads or
Ron> high network traffic. I'm networking two machines and using NFS
Ron> to remotely mount filesystems.
Ron> /var/log/messages shows the following errors:
Ron> localhost kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
Ron> This is with version 1.0.1 (08/26/02) of bcm4400.o
I'm going to try increasing the transmit timeout in this driver:
$ diff b44um.c b44um.c.orig
15,16c15,16
< char bcm4400_version[] = "1.0.1rgo";
< char bcm4400_date[] = "(01/25/03)";
---
> char bcm4400_version[] = "1.0.1";
> char bcm4400_date[] = "(08/26/02)";
49,50c49
< /* Change TX_TIMEOUT from (2*HZ) to (5*HZ) - Ron Olsen 1/25/03 */
< #define TX_TIMEOUT (5*HZ)
---
> #define TX_TIMEOUT (2*HZ)
If the driver is basically sane, but just gets overloaded during periods of
high traffic, this may help. It will increase the interval before the
kernel watchdog timer kicks in to declare the transmitter is hung.
Many other network drivers have TX_TIMEOUT set to (4*HZ) or (5*HZ),
so this is not an unreasonable thing to try.
I'll run some experiments and report back.
--
Ron Olsen
Boulder Colorado
ron_olsen@qwest.net
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