Connie Sieh said...

|We have been experiencing intermittent network failures on systems running 
|SLF47 2.6.9-78.0.1 kernel/tg3 3.86 driver .  They waiting for the tcp to 
|finish, which never happens.  The failures are load-related.
|
|This error happened from time to time over the life of these nodes
|but they were operating more or less stably under SLF45/x86_64, tg3 3.77
|driver.

All I know is that I have found the Broadcom Linux drivers to be
so unstable between releases that I try hard to avoid them.  They
will work just fine with one release, but the next release we try
may be a nightmare.

We have a variety of servers from a few years ago that came with
Broadcom on-board NICs.  Each worked with the initial install it
had been certified with.  OS upgrades was painful, and in each
case we gave up after several hours of fighting drivers and
installed NIC cards using another vendor's chip.

The only systems we've ever had that were rock solid with Broadcom
are some Dell Optiplex 330n desktops.  But we've only run EL4.4 on
them, and we're nervous about the switch to 5.x .  The NIC type was
the one thing we forgot to check on the eval before doing the bulk
order. 8^/

I know that doesn't help you but wanted to add the data point for
anyone else considering systems with these NICs.

FWIW, they seem to work fine in the handful of Windows systems we
have with them. 8^0

-Miles