[vortex] 3c59x "just stops"

[Donald Becker]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Scott A. McIntyre wrote:
> 
> > Yes, SMP, good suggestion on the no apic; will try that.
> 
> AFAIK, only 2.4 has (or had) the problems with lost interrupts on SMP
> systems. If 2.2 had the same problems, there might be something else. The
> suggestion with "noapic" applies to 2.2 as well (if you still want to try
> 2.2).

The 2.2 kernels also have problems with the APIC ceasing delivery of
interrupts.  Shutting down and restarting the drivers using the IRQ
would clear the problem, making it appears as a driver bug.

Several of the drivers have checks or low-rate polling to alert the user
to the problem.

We use "noapic" with the Scyld Beowulf distribution to avoid this
problem.

> > Anywhere from days to weeks.  The most is about two weeks.  This
> > suggested to me that it was somehow tied to the number of Rx'd patckets.

This is consistent with the APIC problem.

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993