[vortex] 3c59x "just stops"

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Donald Becker wrote:

> The 2.2 kernels also have problems with the APIC ceasing delivery of
> interrupts.

Then maybe I'm just lucky! I have SMP cluster nodes and a SMP file-server
and never used "noapic" with 2.2 kernels.

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

I guess alerting is better than nothing but still not sufficient. Would it
be possible to _do_ something in this case ? Like trying again (or more
aggressively) to enable the interrupt... however this might not work well
for shared interrupts.

[ Well, I'm not happy with the fact that the drivers have to deal with the
problem of distributing interrupts, but this exists for some time now and
from what I gathered from different mailing lists, it's not clear if/how
this should be solved. And the fact that 2.4 seems to exhibit this
problem more often than 2.2 is one of the reasons for which I keep my
clusters with 2.2...]

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

If my cluster nodes would have this problem, I would do this too. That's
because the NIC generates several orders of magnitute more interrupts than
anything else in the system. But for a (relatively small) file-server with
1-2 SCSI interfaces and 2-4 (bonded) NICs, that's not really a solution...

Sincerely,

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