[tulip-bug] Re: Very slow performance with FA310TX

[John William]

>From: Wolfgang Walter <wolfgang.walter@stusta.mhn.de>
...
>As it works fine with win I asume that the cabling is ok.
>
>I would say that your your card uses full duplex and the switch only
>half duplex or the other way round. Now you wrote that both ends report 
>full
>duplex -  and then I don't see how you could get these frame errors.
>
>You should try to force your card or switch into 100Mbit hald-duplex (as 
>the
>other side will then use half-duplex, too). Then mesure perfomance. If it 
>is
>much better I really think that your full-duplex is not really full-duplex 
>or
>the driver does something wrong. If peformance remains bad I would say it's
>the driver - if you use the one coming with 2.2.17.

I tried bringing the interface up with "options=13" to force 100baseTx-HD 
mode. The switch indicated HD mode, as did tulip-diag. Transfer performance 
was unchanged. Outbound transfers are still ~5.5MB/sec. Inbound transfers 
are ~300K/sec. Pinging with large packets still causes frame errors.

This is the stock driver included with 2.2.17.

>Please try a newer version: 0.92 or higher.
>
>The version in 2.2.17 works very well with dec-chips till 21143 but not 
>very
>well with clones.
>
>In 0.92 the whole media selection logic is much improved, and it works with
>more clones and cards. On the other hand 0.92 has some bugs which has been
>fixed in 2.2.17 (i.e. TX-hangs).

I have been scared off from the 0.92 driver because of the reports of card 
hangs. I *need* this interface to work. It is a major pain/embarrasment that 
I can't even get 10BT speeds with the adaptor in 100baseTx mode to a switch. 
But slow and working is acceptable (barely) whereas fast and buggy is not.

It really looks like a problem with the driver. Maybe related to this being 
an SMP machine? The hardware works 100% under Win98 for testing, so I don't 
think it's a board, cabling or switch problem. I don't think it's a media 
selection problem since the card and switch indicate full duplex and this 
agrees with tulip-diag. Switching the card to half-duplex causes tulip-diag 
and the switch to indicate the same. But transfer rates don't change and I 
still get frame errors.

I would like to try rebooting the machine as uniprocessor, but have not had 
a chance to do that yet; just to see if SMP/no-SMP makes a difference on the 
same hardware.

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