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 >