2000-12-28 22:42:41

by Mike Elmore

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

All,

Had another nfsd oops today. I was listening to a mp3
that is located on a nfs partition mounted off the machine
that oops'd with no other network activity.

Ksymoops output is attached as well as the regular console
text.

What the heck, I say what the heck is goin on here?

--


Mike Elmore
[email protected]

"Never confuse activity with accomplishment."
-unknown


Attachments:
(No filename) (381.00 B)
sodham-crash2.ksymoops (3.75 kB)
sodham-crash2.txt (1.37 kB)
Download all attachments

2000-12-29 03:52:34

by Mike Elmore

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

All,

You are some damn smart people.

Whatever evil was happening is fixed in test13-pre5.

I pounded it with 3 successive full backups of my
multigig nfs mounted home directory to my Onstream
drive while downloading a kernel and doing multiple
>100M file copies over nfs at the same time while
playing an mp3 off a nfs mounted partition.

It was moving slow cause the card is 10mbs, but all
jobs finished and the machine is now sitting idle
as happy as can be.

Any idea what portion of pre4 got fixed in pre5 to
fix this problem? I'd just like to know so I can
look around if it comes back.

Sorta related:

I really need to get rid of this 8139 card. Since
yall are the oracle, which nice 100mbs card is fine
hardware and is coupled with a well debugged driver?

I don't want to have any more network card problems.
I'm tired of this crappy 8139.

-mwe


On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 01:59:03PM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
>
> Try pre5
>
> Later,
> David S. Miller
> [email protected]
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to [email protected]
> Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

--


Mike Elmore
[email protected]

"Never confuse activity with accomplishment."
-unknown

2000-12-29 04:18:00

by Chris Wedgwood

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 09:21:16PM -0600, Mike Elmore wrote:

Any idea what portion of pre4 got fixed in pre5 to
fix this problem? I'd just like to know so I can
look around if it comes back.

nfs over UDP? My guess is the IP fragmentation fix Alexey posted a
couple of days ago.


--cw

2000-12-29 06:46:20

by Linus Torvalds

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

In article <[email protected]>,
Mike Elmore <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>I really need to get rid of this 8139 card. Since
>yall are the oracle, which nice 100mbs card is fine
>hardware and is coupled with a well debugged driver?

There are always problems with some hardware, but my personal
recommendation for a card would definitely be the Intel Ethernet Pro 100
series (82557).

Unlike the tulip cards (which are pretty good too), there aren't a
million different versions of it. There's a few, but it's not a big
mess. It performs well, and is stable. It's pretty well documented
(apart from the magic extensions), and it's common.

That said, some people have trouble even with that card. Nobody knows
why, but at least the driver is actively maintained etc, so I still am
not nervous about recommending it.

I bet that others will have other recommendations, but so far I have at
least personally had good luck with the eepro100.

Linus

2000-12-29 08:45:23

by David Ford

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

> I really need to get rid of this 8139 card. Since
> yall are the oracle, which nice 100mbs card is fine
> hardware and is coupled with a well debugged driver?
>
> I don't want to have any more network card problems.
> I'm tired of this crappy 8139.

I have an 8139 card and it's on a 2.4 testN kernel that's several weeks old but
it's running like a champ at 200FD, sometimes heavily loaded.

-d


Attachments:
david.vcf (274.00 B)
Card for David Ford

2000-12-29 09:22:04

by Ray Strode

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

> I don't want to have any more network card problems.
> I'm tired of this crappy 8139.
hmmm... The only cards I'll buy are 8139 based (SMC EZNet 10/100).
They have worked great on every OS i've tried and only cost 14 bucks
at my local CompUSA. I love em to pieces... The newer ones are only
like an inch tall too.. very slick.

--Ray

2000-12-29 10:56:40

by Chris Wedgwood

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

On Thu, Dec 28, 2000 at 10:15:17PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

I bet that others will have other recommendations, but so far I
have at least personally had good luck with the eepro100.

I have (and still do) use 3c59x, 3c90x cards, eepro100 and tulips
cards. They all work reasonably well except they all have their own
quirks and none of them are as reliable as (say) the hme cards in our
Solaris machines.

Nor are they as reliable as the same hardware under FreeBSD, which is
somewhat embarrassing.

I have to wonder -- am I jinxed or do other people also find this?

I'm also slightly perturbed by the fact there is no easy way to set
media and duplex on all the cards. This was discussed on netdev not
long ago and I tried hacking ethtool support into the 3c59x code but
its far from a clean job. I'm not sure how simple this would be for
other drivers. Both Solaris and FreeBSD let you set media and duplex
in a uniform way; it's a pity Linux cannot.



--cw

P.S. FWIW I'm currently trying to standardize on eepro100 cards; so
far so good except nder sustained load (i.e. 100M full duplex
completely saturated for many minutes) I get:

eth1: card reports no resources.

messages. Looking at the driver source code I can't see wy these
might occur (I don't have the specs, I'm just going by the
surrounding code). No harm, but what seems like a slight
slowdown when this occurs.

2000-12-29 16:50:26

by Jeff Chua

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

the only thing you've to be careful is to make sure you set
the correct options for the module (if you compiled it as module).

# options=0x30 100mbps full duplex
# options=0x20 100mbps half duplex
# options=0 10mbps half duplex
options eepro100 options=0

Otherwise, it'll cause a lot of unnecessary network traffic and
slow down your network!

These are not obvious unless you read the source code.

Jeff.


>From [email protected] Fri Dec 29 14:14:55 2000
X-Authentication-Warning: palladium.transmeta.com: mail set sender to [email protected] using -f
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected] (Linus Torvalds)
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again
Date: 28 Dec 2000 22:15:17 -0800
Organization: Transmeta Corporation
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Precedence: bulk
X-Mailing-List: [email protected]

In article <[email protected]>,
Mike Elmore <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>I really need to get rid of this 8139 card. Since
>yall are the oracle, which nice 100mbs card is fine
>hardware and is coupled with a well debugged driver?

There are always problems with some hardware, but my personal
recommendation for a card would definitely be the Intel Ethernet Pro 100
series (82557).

Unlike the tulip cards (which are pretty good too), there aren't a
million different versions of it. There's a few, but it's not a big
mess. It performs well, and is stable. It's pretty well documented
(apart from the magic extensions), and it's common.

That said, some people have trouble even with that card. Nobody knows
why, but at least the driver is actively maintained etc, so I still am
not nervous about recommending it.

I bet that others will have other recommendations, but so far I have at
least personally had good luck with the eepro100.

Linus

2000-12-30 11:06:56

by Andrew Morton

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> I bet that others will have other recommendations, but so far I have at
> least personally had good luck with the eepro100.

The 3c905C is a well manufactured and very feature-rich NIC which at
present appears to have fewer problem reports than eepro100, 8139 or tulip.

Available in PCI, Cardbus, Mini-PCI. A dual-interface PCI version has
just been released (3c982), although we've yet to hear of anyone trying
it with Linux.

3com provide full specs without any NDA restrictions, plus a GPL'ed
driver.

Perhaps most significantly, the 905 has full scatter/gather support.
This isn't used at present, but Alexey's zerocopy-sendfile patches
do utilise it. He currently has scatter-gather support for acenic,
3c905 and sunhme. I don't know what the plans are to support other
100 mbps NICs.

The in-kernel 3c59x.c isn't the world's fastest driver. On the todo list
for 2.5 is MMIO support, scatter-gather maintenance, optional use of DPD
polling and implementation of the onboard multicast hash filter. And
implementation of the on-board VLAN support if 2.5 becomes VLAN-capable.

-

2000-12-30 18:37:43

by Francois Romieu

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4 nfsd Oops rears it head again

Andrew Morton <[email protected]> ?crit :
[...]
> The 3c905C is a well manufactured and very feature-rich NIC which at
> present appears to have fewer problem reports than eepro100, 8139 or tulip.

I guess that the lack of problem reports for the epic chipset comes from
a smaller user base. FWIW, I haven't experienced real problems with
it (observation base: 20~30 boards). Neither did I with the few 3c905 used btw.

[...]
> Perhaps most significantly, the 905 has full scatter/gather support.

May be done for the epic. TODO++

--
Ueimor

2000-12-30 23:32:17

by Barry K. Nathan

[permalink] [raw]
Subject: NIC recommendations (was Re: Repeatable 2.4.0-test13-pre4...)

Andrew Morton wrote:
> The 3c905C is a well manufactured and very feature-rich NIC which at
> present appears to have fewer problem reports than eepro100, 8139 or tulip.

3c905c is a bit expensive, though. pcnet32 cards also work very well for
me, and are less expensive. The 905c could be a better card (I don't
really know), but pcnet32's might be more cost-effective, depending
on your needs. (I've seen pcnet32-based cards selling for $15-20, and
I bought a new 10-pack (of HP NightDirector 10/100's) for about $36,
including shipping, on eBay.)

In any case, tulips have been more problematic for me than 8139, pcnet32,
or 3c905c (whose reliability are all comparable IME). I've never tried
eepro100, though. (Also, I'm speaking in terms of my experiences across
all OS's which I've used the cards under, not just under Linux, although
my Linux experiences are similar to the experiences I've had overall.)

Anyway, those are my experiences and recommendations. YMMV. :)

-Barry K. Nathan <[email protected]>