Broadcom BCM5704 Driver Problem

[Brett Johnson]

Hello All,

I've just deployed several IBM (x3650) servers all running 6.2-Release.
Each of these systems has two on board gigabit ethernet cards using the 
BCM5708 chipset which work fine. (bce driver)
Four of these machines have an added dual port gigabit pci-x card with 
the BCM5704 chipset, these cards experience packet loss. (bge drivers)

I have tried setting the speed/duplex to gig/full, gig/half, 100/full, 
100/half and I still get packet loss of upto 30% across the interfaces.
At present I'm running the cards at 10base/utp and that seems to have 
fixed the packet loss problem.

Testing was done using 2 cisco 2960's and a dlink des-1024r+ switch, 
same problem using any of the three switches.

bge0: <Broadcom BCM5704 B0, ASIC rev. 0x2100> mem 0xc7ef0000-0xc7efffff 
irq 24 at device 3.0 on pci8
bge1: <Broadcom BCM5704 B0, ASIC rev. 0x2100> mem 0xc7ee0000-0xc7eeffff 
irq 25 at device 3.1 on pci8
bce0: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1), v0.9.6> mem 
0xce000000-0xcfffffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci3
bce1: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B1), v0.9.6> mem 
0xca000000-0xcbffffff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci6

The machines in question are load balancing several web servers and the 
10mbit solution is causing nearly as many problems as the initial packet 
loss problem, any suggestions/ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Brett Johnson
brett at unix.org.au