linux-kernel - Re: Strange problem with e1000 driver

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Date:	Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:25:12 -0600
From:	Robert Hancock <hancockr@...w.ca>
To:	vatsa@...ux.vnet.ibm.com
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, e1000-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net,
	varunc@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, jbarnes@...tuousgeek.org, greg@...ah.com
Subject: Re: Strange problem with e1000 driver - ping packet loss

Srivatsa Vaddagiri wrote:
> Hi,
> 	I happened to look at a system which was exhibiting poor ping
> performance with e1000 driver (in 2.6.25) and had some questions regarding that.
> 
> Ping test was done between the system and a laptop, which were connected
> using a straight ethernet cable. Ping reported round trip times running
> into seconds (!) and also packet loss.
> 
> Upon some investigation, I found that the interrupt count field in
> /proc/interrupts (associated with eth1) is not incrementing as fast as
> it should. Moreover eth1 interrupt line is shared with the hard disk
> interrupt (ata_piix) as below:
> 
> # cat /proc/interrupts
> 
> .
> 
>  10:       2296    XT-PIC-XT        ata_piix, eth0, eth1
> 
> .
> 
> IRQ10 is thus being shared by both the hard disk and eth0/eth1.
> 
> Here's the strange observation I made:
> 
> When I initiate some disk activity (ex: dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file), ping 
> performance suddently shot up (round trip time in double digits ms, 0% packet 
> loss)! I presume this is because that e1000 intr handler is called
> whenever there was a interrupt from hard disk on IRQ10, which polled
> NIC and processed packets immediately.
> 
> As soon as I kill the background disk-write intensive job, ping
> performance again dropped.
> 
> This meant that e1000 NIC is having trouble interrupting the OS.
> 
> Before I could jump up and say this is a hardware issue, I was told
> that Windows works just fine on the server (and as well as 2.4 kernel,
> which I couldnt verify) :(
> 
> 
> Some more observations:
> 
> 1. I tried setting e1000 parameters (RxIntDelay=0, RxAbsIntDelay=0,
>    TxIntDelay=0, TxAbsIntDelay=0, InterruptThrottleRate=0). None of
>    them helped.
> 
> 2. When ping performance was poor, readprofile showed that system
>    is mostly idle. This confirms that OS is not getting very
>    frequenty interrupts from eth1 and hence idling.
> 
> 3. When ping performance was poor, ethtool -S eth1 showed that
>    rx_bytes was incrementing at a good pace, showing that the 
>    NIC was receiving ping responses back, but not handing them over
>    to OS for further processing
> 
> 4. e1000 chipset is 82546GB
> 
> 5. e1000e driver didnt work at all (it doesnt recognize the cards).
> 
> 
> Any advice on how to fix this problem?

Can you post your dmesg output from bootup with no special options 
(noacpi, etc.) enabled?
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