From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Roland Dreier Subject: Re: intermittant petabyte usage reported with broadcom nic Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:28:37 -0700 Message-ID: References: <20070402014319.GA8345@zip.com.au> <20070402001300.3b66007d.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070412225249.GU8345@zip.com.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Michael Chan , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org To: CaT Return-path: Received: from sj-iport-6.cisco.com ([171.71.176.117]:39387 "EHLO sj-iport-6.cisco.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753906AbXDLX2m (ORCPT ); Thu, 12 Apr 2007 19:28:42 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20070412225249.GU8345@zip.com.au> (cat@zip.com.au's message of "Fri, 13 Apr 2007 08:52:49 +1000") Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org [Adding Michael Chan, who seems to look after bnx2, to the cc list] > To clarify it's an Intel Dual Core Xeon (I just wound up as thinking of > them all as amd64s). Network card driver in use is the one defined by > CONFIG_BNX2. Kernel's monolithic. >>From a quick look at bnx2.c, it seems that the driver gives the NIC (firmware?) a block of memory to DMA stats into, and just reads from that memory in its get_stats method. So if you're seeing wonky stats from the NIC intermittently, my best guess would be that firmware is occasionally writing junk into the stats block. - R.