Subject: Re: occasionally corrupted network stats in /proc/net/dev

From: "Michael Chan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:41:09 -0800

On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 20:12 +0100, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> Mark Seger a écrit :
> > Ignore that last one as it was pointed out to me that we have both nic 
> > installed on many of our systems and ethtool told me the one 
> > associated with the nic is actually the broadcom one.
> >
> > version:        1.4.38 E1B1EC867DEEB8027B2DA0F
> > license:        GPL
> > description:    Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5706/5708 Driver
> >
> 
> I remember some tg3 chips actually have bugs when reporting stats.... 
> once in a while
> 
> CCed to Michael Chan to get some details.

Yes, that's right.  Some BNX2 chips have this problem and we have a
workaround:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/davem/net-2.6.git;a=commit;h=02537b0676930b1bd9aff2139e0e645c79986931

The chip sometimes DMA wrong counter values if the chip is also
internally gathering the counters at the time of the DMA.

Driver 1.5.11 and later versions have this workaround.