"Fast Switching" or NIC-to-NIC communications AND channel bonding discouragement

[Brian Dushaw]

When compiling the kernel recently, I noticed the option for "fast
switching" for faster communications when connected NIC-to-NIC.  The
help sez the "tulip" supports this.  I enabled this option, but
the communication speed (checked via netperf) is unchanged.  Is there
some other voodoo, some goat to be burned, to enable the "fast 
switching"?  I have the Linksys LNE100TX cards and the tulip driver
from the supplied floppy (other drivers seem to not to work so well with
this card).

On a similar topic, I have tried channel bonding with the 2.2.x kernels
(T. Davis' patch) and found that it was only marginally effective (and
not effective at all for MPI or pghpf parallelizations - things got worse).
There is some suggestion that this has to do with the "stack [??]"
inefficiencies of the 2.2.x kernels, that is better in 2.3.x [but what do
I know of this? nothing...]  Does anyone have any wise words for better
channel bonding performance?

This spring I am,
    tip-toeing through the tulips,

B.D.


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