em driver testing

[Nikolay Pavlov]

On Wednesday,  8 November 2006 at  9:26:26 -0700, Scott Long wrote:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> >On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 04:40:03PM +0200, Nikolay Pavlov wrote:
> >>Well i have 5.5 box with very similar symptomatic :)
> >>I do not see watchdog timeouts on it, but a lot of UP/DOWN events.
> >
> >Are you sure this is the same problem as what's being discussed
> >here?  If you revert to a previous kernel or em driver, does the
> >problem (link up/down) go away?  Are you sure you don't actually
> >have a flaky cable or RJ45 connector?  What does the switch your
> >NIC is connected to say? (does it show link going up and down)
> >
> >I feel horrible for both Scott and Jack -- I think there's tons
> >of people coming out of the woodwork with "ME TOO" comments who
> >may in fact be suffering from other problems, and are looking for
> >a scapegoat thread.
> >
> 
> The timeout/watchdog mechanism in the interface layer has been a problem
> ever since the MPSAFE work was done on the network stack.  It's prone to
> races, and as the OS has improved and gotten faster over the past 2
> years, those races have gotten bigger.  In a way, it's a actually a
> positive indication of progress and improvement =-)
> 
> I don't doubt that there are users with other problems.  We spent some
> time collecting as much user data as we could in order to find patterns
> and weed out the uncommon cases.  But this timer/watchdog thing looks to
> be a strong candidate for being the root cause of many of the problems.
> We'll continue to investigate these problems and address other drivers.
> 
> Scott

Thanks Scott. From my side, I'd like to say that I'm always ready to 
help you in testing.

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- Best regards, Nikolay Pavlov. <<<-----------------------------------    
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