ale stats (AR8121)

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 09:31:03AM -0400, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> At 12:41 PM 5/26/2010, Pyun YongHyeon wrote:
> 
> >Anyway I have to ask Atheros what the counter really means.
> >Thanks for reminding it. If I get some feedback I'll let you know.
> 
> Thanks!
> One more question about this NIC. While doing some stress testing as 
> an nfsserver, I did get a few fifo overflows.  Is there any tuning 
> that can be done to handle greater loads ?
> 

ale(4) controllers are low-end consumer ethernet controllers.
Driver has to copy every received frames from DMAed buffer to mbufs
and it requires a lot of CPU cycles. The controller works like
gigabit rl(4) controller. This may not be a problem for desktop or
notebook usage but it wouln't be appropriate on server.
I guess you would get more RX FIFO errors under high load and there
would be little thing to be done in that situation. Maybe enabling
ethernet flow controll would be help to mitigate this. marius@ is
working on implementing flow control, so when the code hits tree
I'll enable it on all drivers that can handle it.

> dev.ale.0.%desc: Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCIe Ethernet
> dev.ale.0.%driver: ale
> dev.ale.0.%location: slot=0 function=0
> dev.ale.0.%pnpinfo: vendor=0x1969 device=0x1026 subvendor=0x1043 
> subdevice=0x8226 class=0x020000
> dev.ale.0.%parent: pci4
> dev.ale.0.int_rx_mod: 30
> dev.ale.0.int_tx_mod: 1000
> dev.ale.0.process_limit: 64
> dev.ale.0.reset_brk_seq: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_frames: 40750507
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_bcast_frames: 56321
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_mcast_frames: 9
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.pause_frames: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.control_frames: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.crc_errs: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.len_errs: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_octets: 60667019510
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_bcast_octets: 4090260
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.good_mcast_octets: 1220
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.runts: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.fragments: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_64: 96112
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_65_127: 224804
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_128_255: 162357
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_256_511: 6546
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_512_1023: 213983
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_1024_1518: 40088225
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.frames_1519_max: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.trunc_errs: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.fifo_oflows: 87
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.rrs_errs: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.align_errs: 0
> dev.ale.0.stats.rx.filtered: 41433
> 
> Is
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mike Tancsa,                                      tel +1 519 651 3400
> Sentex Communications,                            mike at sentex.net
> Providing Internet since 1994                    www.sentex.net
> Cambridge, Ontario Canada                         www.sentex.net/mike
>