[tulip] Where are my packets going??

Ben Greear greearb@candelatech.com
Sun Oct 20 21:16:00 2002


After increasing the tx and rx buffers for the kernel tulip driver, it
has been working better for my p430 nic.  I don't know why this would
have a measurable affect.

I am confused about something else too:

When running a single port, I can run 50Mbps w/out dropping more than 1 in 6 million
packets.  If I run 10Mbps on 4 ports, I see 1000 per million packets dropped
per port.

However, the driver counters do not show any significant number of drops.
More interestingly, it seems some packets are just lost on the wire, and
are never accounted for anywhere:

I have zero receive or transmit errors, but one port claims to have transmitted
322589 packets, and the port it is connected to (via cross-over cable) has only
received 322051 packets.  This spread increases over time, so it is not just
packets in transit...

Any ideas where these lost packets are going, or how to find out??

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear