[vortex] Dual port 3c920

Paul English tallpaul@speakeasy.org
Wed Aug 7 14:17:01 2002


I have a Beowulf cluster with Tyan S2462 motherboards, each with dual 
3c920 onboard. I am currently using only one of them on each system, and I 
would like to improve the interconnect speed of the system overall as it 
is a bottleneck.

I've heard (off-list) that on this motherboard it is essentially a dual 
port single nic, instead of literally two nics, so for some reason running 
non-IP protocols (like MPI, etc) would not work. Is that correct? Even if 
that were the case, might I still be able to put in a second switch and 
use one NIC in each system and a dedicated subnet to at least remove the 
NFS traffic from the rest of the traffic?

Also has anyone had any luck getting the mvia driver working for this 
board? According to the copyright info it is just a revision of the Scyld 
driver with the mvia hooks in it, but I keep getting the following error:
/usr/bin/gcc -pipe -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O6 -fomit-frame-pointer 
-m486 -malign-loops=2 -malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2 -DCPU=586 -DVIA 
-I/usr/src/linux-"2.4.16"-mvia/include -D__SMP__ 
-I/usr/local/src/mvia-1.2b2/src/vipk_core 
-I/usr/local/src/mvia-1.2b2/src/vipl -DMVIA_ERING_MINOR=10 
-I/usr/local/src/mvia-1.2b2/src/vipk_devs/vipk_ering -include 
/usr/src/linux-"2.4.16"-mvia/include/linux/modversions.h -include 
/usr/src/linux-"2.4.16"-mvia/include/linux/version.h -D__KERNEL__ -DLINUX 
-DMODVERSIONS -DMODULE -DVIPK_MAX_MAPPABLE_PAGES=4096  
-D__BOOT_KERNEL_UP=0 -D__BOOT_KERNEL_SMP=1  -c -o 3c59x.o 3c59x.c
3c59x.c:1247: conflicting types for `wait_for_completion'
/usr/src/linux-2.4.16-mvia/include/linux/completion.h:30: previous 
declaration of
`wait_for_completion'
3c59x.c:2888: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
3c59x.c:2889: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[1]: *** [3c59x.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory 
`/usr/local/src/mvia-1.2b2/src/vipk_devs_nonlbl/2.4/vipk_3c59x'

Presumably mvia would give me a speed up as well (I think I'm both latency 
and throughput bound). I haven't had any luck getting help from the mvia 
support list - it is not a subscribable list, so I thought I'd try here.

Paul