Re: Intel CSA Gigabit Bug in IC7-G Motherboards- Affects Windows/Linux

From: Justin Piszcz
Date: Mon Feb 20 2006 - 05:26:12 EST


Have you tried running without NAPI? (disable it in your config in the
e1000 section)

I have always used NAPI, I will test this later today and let you know the results with NAPI off, thanks.

Is there anything I need to be aware of using a CSA-based ethernet device vs. no CSA?

Thanks,

Justin.


On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Jesse Brandeburg wrote:

On 2/19/06, Justin Piszcz <jpiszcz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Essentially, when you copy large amounts of data across the NIC it will
"freeze" the box in Linux (any 2.6.x kernel, have not tried 2.4.x) or
Windows XP SP2.

I've heard isolated reports about issues with the CSA connected NIC,
but we've not been able to reproduce much in our labs and (mostly)
people haven't been complaining about it.

If you checkout the thread, it occurs for multiple people under various
OS' but in *some* cases if they use ABIT's IC7-G CSA/INTEL driver, they
their problems go away.

In Linux when I used to use the onboard NIC, it froze the box, I did not
have sysrq enabled at the time when this happened but frozen I mean screen
is frozen, no ping, box is inoperative.

Have you tried running without NAPI? (disable it in your config in the
e1000 section)

Nothing pecuilar was ever found in any of the logs or dmesg output
regarding the crash.

Basically its the first revision of CSA gigabit on a motherboard from what
I read in the forums and unless you use ABIT's specially crafted driver,
it will crash the machine when you copy either:

a) large amounts of data over a gigabit link
or
b) that death.zip file (unzipped of course) which contains the bad "bits"
that are probably seen/repeated when copying large amounts of data

I'll have our lab attempt to reproduce the bug (again) this time using
the special file. I can't speak to the windows crash, sorry.

please send your .config, cat /proc/interrupts, dmesg after driver is
up, whether NAPI is on, what exact steps you use to reproduce the
problem, what your environment is (i.e. copying to a windows server,
etc) pretty much follow the instructions in
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/reporting-bugs.html

Jesse

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