These all seem to be newer broadcom chips.  Good to know that these are 
better. The chip in question is a 5704.

-Connie Sieh

On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Jon Peatfield 
wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Feb 2009, Miles O'Neal wrote:
>
>> 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^/
>
> We have plenty of Optiplex boxes running sl5 and the 620, 647 models have
> broadcom chips though maybe not the same as the 330.  For what it's worth
> these are the lspci {,-n} lines for a 620 and a 745 for you to compare:
>
> 620:
>  02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5751 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 01)
>  02:00.0 0200: 14e4:1677 (rev 01)
>
> 745:
>  03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5754 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
>  03:00.0 0200: 14e4:167a (rev 02)
>
> those seem to work flawlessly with the sl5 stock kernels though we might
> have needed sl51 to support the chip in the 745.  Of course for the 755,
> 760 Dell have gone back to using Intel chips (and the 760 needs the sl53
> kernels but otherwise seems fine).
>
> We have another higher end desktop using the tg3 on sl5 which is also
> fine:
>
> Dell Precision 490:
>  0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5752 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
>  0b:00.0 0200: 14e4:1600 (rev 02)
>
> We also have a Dell PE860 (cheap server) which uses the tg3 driver:
>
> 04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11)
> 05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5721 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 11)
>
> 04:00.0 Class 0200: 14e4:1659 (rev 11)
> 05:00.0 Class 0200: 14e4:1659 (rev 11)
>
> and that seems solid enough, though it is running a custom kernel on an
> sl3 base (it is a firewall keeping user's laptops off our main networks so
> I'd get complaints if it was failing).
>
> None of the 'non-Dell' machines we have (working with slX) seem to use the
> tg3 driver for some reason.  I'm not sure if that is co-incidence or not.
>
>  -- Jon
>