Re: intermittant petabyte usage reported with broadcom nic

[Jean-Daniel Pauget <jd@disjunkt.com>]

    I don't know if a me-too may help you, but I have exactly the same 
    trouble on a whole set of dell servers, all with bmx drivers (suse 10.1
    kernel) and values fetched by an homebrew daemon and collected via rrd.

> uname -a
Linux toronto 2.6.16.27-0.6-smp #1 SMP Wed Dec 13 09:34:50 UTC 2006 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

.../...
<6>Broadcom NetXtreme II Gigabit Ethernet Driver bnx2 v1.4.31 (January 19, 2006)
<6>ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:09:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
<6>usbcore: registered new driver hub
<6>eth0: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B2) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f4000000, IRQ 169, node addr 0015c5f18146
<6>ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:05:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
<6>eth1: Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B2) PCI-X 64-bit 133MHz found at mem f8000000, IRQ 169, node addr 0015c5f18144
.../...


On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 05:41:08PM +1000, CaT wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 12:13:00AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 11:43:19 +1000 CaT <cat@zip.com.au> wrote:
> > 
> > > I take minute by minute snapshots of network traffic by sampling
> > > /proc/net/dev and most of the time everything works fine. Occasionally
> > > though I get petabyte byte traffic and corresponding packet traffic.

    on my side measures are performed on a 10sec frequency basis

> > How frequently?
> 
> I can count about 6 over the past month.

    almost once a day per machine.

> > Are you able to provide some actual numbers (expected and actual 
> > values),
> > so we can look at the bit patterns?

    I can patch my app in order to give you those exact numbers (I'm afraid 
    not to be an rrd expert to extract real past values reported)
    on another side, I cannot really test new drivers on those machine just 
    for those tests.

> > > This happens on an AMD64, dual core smp box with Broadcom NetXtreme 
> > > II
> > > nics.
> > 
> > What driver drivers that?  b44.c?
> bnx2

> 
> > > The issue happens with both nics but at different times. The same
> > > sampling code runs on p4 boxes with ht on and e1000 nics without issues
> > > so I don't believe it's an issue with my code (famous last words :)

    exactly the same, just xeons instead of AMD.

-- 
    Jean-Daniel Pauget

    Tél: +33 (0)2 33 17 20 16
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