Re: 2.4.12-ac4 10Mbit NE2k interrupt load kills p166

vda
2001-12-10T06:57:09Z

Unfortunately, this will most likely fall under
'almost nobody interested in fiddling with old hw' category...

On Saturday 08 December 2001 19:58, Samium Gromoff wrote:
> " Martin Josefsson wrote:"
> > I had an AMD K6 200 with an ISA NE2K card whan I started using Linux...
> > I started using kernel 2.0 and that card worked very nice.
> > I could even play quake while sending out data at 10Mbit/s, I didn't even
> > notice that the transfer had started.
> >
> > Then I upgraded to kernel 2.2 and I was no longer able to play quake
> > while tranmitting at 10Mbit/s with the exact same hardware. Sometimes I
> > could hardly even play mp3's :(
> >
> > Then a friend of mine that also upgraded to kernel 2.2 began complaining
> > that his machine also became extremely slow and unresponsive while
> > transitting at 10Mbit/s, in fact that machine was even slower than mine
> > during the transfers and his cpu was a bit faster than mine (also AMD).
> >
> > Then I upgraded that machine to pIII 700 and even that machine slows to a
> > crawl while transmitting with that bloody ISA NE2K. It's the same thing
> > in kernel 2.4 too. These days I simply don't use that card anymore...
> >
> > So something seems to have taken a wrong turn between 2.0 and 2.2
> > I don't think this is a problem intruduced in 2.4.
>
> The question is whether anybody is interesting in investigation of
> such broken behaviour.
> i`ve made a further research and discovered the fact that
> ping -l 99999999 - does not corrupt the sound
> ping -l 99999999 -s 256 - does not corrupt the sound
> ping -l 99999999 -s 512 - significantly corrupts the sound
> ping -l 99999999 -s 16384 - heavily corrupts the sound with stalls
>
> as a reminder -l xxxx option forces ping to spit out data as fast as
> possible making it a great bandwidth loader...
>
> Initial look at the result makes me think that at certain level the
> interrupt handler just takes too long time and preempts the sound driver
> or whatever.
> My thinking is that if 2.0 was better than 2.4 in this case, we
> definitely need to find out why was it so and use its strong side.
--
vda