[vortex] receive FIFO errors on vortex ethernet cards

[Heflin, Roger A.]

The vortex motherboards are Tyan S2462 motherboards, they are build
in, there are no other PCI cards on the motherboards, and only 1 of the
2 build-in networks is being used.

The eepro motherboards are a couple of different major types, one
is the standard 440BX/GX motherboard with a card in a PCI slot
(these are at least two different manufacturers-ASUS,Supermicro)
and the other is a Serverworks LE/HE board with a build-in 
eepro both 

A few are 440BX/GX with intels dual eepro100 card build in

The tyan S2462's seem to be pretty consistantly getting these
errors (almost all of these have fair numbers of errors on them), 
the 440BX/GX some are getting the errors quite a few
have not got any errors of this sort at all in the last 2 weeks.
A few of the serverworks machines are getting a few errors
(we have supermicro, and tyan here, the supermicro's appear
to have alot less of this error than the tyans),
and quite a number of them are getting no errors at all,
and 2-5 are getting 2-3 orders of magnitue more than
others that are only getting a few errors.

I am still checking the data to see if anything clears up
exactly what I am seeing, I am going to process the data
and see if traffic load has something to do with it.

			Roger


> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Donald Becker [SMTP:becker@scyld.com]
> Sent:	Saturday, August 17, 2002 6:47 AM
> To:	Heflin, Roger A.
> Cc:	vortex@scyld.com
> Subject:	Re: [vortex] receive FIFO errors on vortex ethernet cards
> 
> On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Heflin, Roger A. wrote:
> 
> > Anyone know what receive FIFO errors mean?  
> > 
> > They don't seem to be causing major issues, but they do seem to be load
> > related.   I get the errors both on vortex cards, and eepro cards, though they
> > seem to have higher rates on the vortex cards (the vortex machines are
> > faster machines).   I am getting on the order of 3-4 fifo errors a second under
> > heavy network load.
> 
> If you are getting them on both NIC types, you are apparently running
> out of PCI bandwidth, or are having a bus access problem.
> 
> > Are there any kernel or network driver parameters I can change to 
> > decrease these errors?
> 
> This is usually caused by some other device on the PCI bus.  We must
> know the system (chipset and motherboard) type, the other devices on the
> bus, and what the other drivers are doing before we can venture a guess.
> 
> -- 
> Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
> Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
> 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
> Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993
>