[vortex] Re: vortex 3c982, 3C90x etc

Bogdan Costescu bogdan.costescu@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Wed Aug 7 08:46:01 2002


On Tue, 6 Aug 2002, Thomas wrote:

> I found the January (long time ago) mailing list about hangs in the ethx 
> section.

Could you please post a link to the exact archived message that you reffer 
to ?

> I have a Tyan Thunder K7X with two of these LAN controllers called 982.
> I get exactly the same problem every few seconds a hang in the system. 
> My average ping time is 0,1ms and ervery few seconds it goes up to 200 
> or more ms'.

What is the network topology ?

> The IRQ (/proc/interrupts) go like crazy ! For a 10 min ping I receive 
> around 10,000,000 Irq's on both CPU's!! Not too bad !

Normal ping (with 1 packet every second) or 'ping -f' ? For normal ping 
the number of interrupts is certainly too high. Do you have several 
devices sharing the same interrupt line (shown in /proc/interrupts) ?

Do you have a standalone PCI network card to test instead of the on-board 
LAN controllers ? Do other devices (if any) in the computer generate 
"normal" interrupt rates or very high like this one ?

> With a hang ervery few seconds I also receive an error message APIC 
> error on CPU ... 02(02) and a error 0xEX81 where X=0,4,6

What kernel are you running ? Based on these error messages, I guess it's 
something based on 2.4.18 (I have Tyan Tigers here which log the same APIC 
error with 2.4.18-something from RedHat, while an earlier 2.4.16 based 
kernel doesn't).
Are you using the 3c59x driver provided with the kernel or the one from 
Scyld ?

> Ther problem is consistent ! the option nopaic during boot sucks, as the 
>   error rate is going up during Raid System active sections

Could you rephrase this ? I don't quite get the meaning, sorry !

> Please do a reply all, so that I can get the message on my other account

I added vortex mailing-list to the CC list too...

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De