Well, now we know that the workaround Dell gave us is truly a resolution
too.
I hope this helps everyone.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Network issue on servers containing BCM 5709 / 5716 cards
resolved -
Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 23:10:44 +0530
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Hello,
Connectivity loss was observed under some heavy traffic conditions on
RHEL 5.3/5.4/5.5 on servers containing BCM 5709/5716 cards.
Work around:
The issue is MSI-X specific. So passing "disable_msi=1" to the bnx2
driver would prevent the issue from happening.
Root cause details and fix:
The card was dropping the PCI writes issued to clear the mask bit in the
MSI-X vector control field as part of MSI-X handling. As a result, the
vector was lost and all the traffic associated with this vector would be
dropped.
This is fixed by increasing the GRC timeout value for the PCI
read/writes by setting a bit in the card's register.
Upstream fix:
Please find the upstream fix to this issue at this link -
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commi
t;h=c441b8d2cb2194b05550a558d6d95d8944e56a84
Kbase Link - http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/docs/DOC-26837 (Does not
contain the details about the fix)
RHEL update containing this fix -
The RHEL 5.5 errata kernel, kernel-2.6.18-194.3.1.el5.x86_64.rpm
contains the fix for this issue.
With regards,
Narendra K
Linux Engineering
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--
<< MCT>> Michael C Tiernan. xmpp:[log in to unmask]
MIT - Laboratory for Nuclear Science - http://www.lns.mit.edu
High Perf Research Computing Facility at The Bates Linear Accelerator
"Bit-smashing your bits better than anyone can!"
