[eepro100] eth0: card reports no resources

[Ben Greear]

Irene Koo wrote:
> hi,
> 
> recently several of our linux machines are experiencing
> the eth0:card reports no resources problem.
> 
> our machines are HP Pentium III 1.2G Hz 2-CPU machines,
> running redhat 2.4.18-10smp kernel
> 
> i have read through the previous emails in the archive
> and updated the bdflush with
>    echo 100 >> /proc/sys/vm/bdflush
> (i read from the documentations that the 2nd, 3rd
>    parameters are dummy)
> 
> and used the ipTraf to monitor the # of packets in/out
> of the system.
> 
> i was wondering if anybody knows what's the max
> traffic the NIC can handle? we are running some medium~high
> traffic onto the systems

I have run sustained 96Mbps send + receive on two ports for 4+ days.

However, this was using the tulip driver, and it was using a low level
packet generator (pktgen).  This does lead me to be a little skeptical
about the excuse that it is the operating system that is screwing up, and
not the hardware/driver...

I have also run a sustained 85Mbps stream send + receive over two ports,
from user space, on tulip and have seen no problems (12 hour run, so far)

Mr Becker, I would be glad to hear of a reason why the e100 seems to have
these problems but the tulip does not.  Is the tulip driver/chipset that
much better?  (I had always assumed that the e100 hardware was supperior).

> my systems show
> 
> 
> x
> x Total rates:        672.6 kbits/sec        Broadcast packets:          504
> x
> x                     568.2 packets/sec      Broadcast bytes:         172368
> x
> x
> x
> x Incoming rates:     296.8 kbits/sec
> x
> x                     289.0 packets/sec
> x
> x                                            IP checksum errors:           0
> x
> x Outgoing rates:     375.8 kbits/sec
> x
> x                     279.2 packets/sec

These rates are very slow, and you should have no problems.  Of course, you may
have very bursty traffic from time to time.

Cat out /proc/net/dev and see if you have a bunch of errors that may indicate
cable or some other physical problem.

If worse comes to worse, try Intel's e100 driver (it ships with RH I believe).

Enjoy,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear