High load - lost network

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 08:13:23AM +0100, Christer Solskogen wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 
> > Well shoot, that didn't tell me what I want.  pciconv -lv, and look
> > for the em0 entry?  (I need all the lines shown associated with it)
> > 
> 
> Here you go:
> 
> em0 at pci0:1:1:0: class=0x020000 card=0x342f8086 chip=0x10758086 rev=0x00
> hdr=0x00
>     vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'
>     device     = '82547EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller'
>     class      = network
>     subclass   = ethernet

Thanks.  There's a specific model that has a watchdog timeout problem,
which is known to cause network drops.  The root cause was an improperly
set bit inside of the NIC's EEPROM (and can be fixed using a DOS utility
from Intel).  Your NIC isn't that particular model, so you're safe.

Your issue appears to be with the ATA controller on your machine having
a very high interrupt rate, and since the NIC's IRQ is shared with that,
any heavy interrupt activity causes the opposing device to malfunction.

I'm not really sure anyone will know how to fix this.  Sometimes a BIOS
upgrade can fix such things, other times motherboard replacements are in
order.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |