Subject: Re: skge vs sk98lin

From: Michael Stone <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 10:20:26 -0400

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 10:15:18AM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>On Tue, 08 May 2007 08:00:36 -0400
>Michael Stone <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> 2.6.21 seems to have fixed the stability issues I was seeing when using 
>> the skge driver with the older sk98xx dual port fiber cards. There is 
>> still one more lingering oddness: if I have *two* dual port cards in a 
>> system, say eth2-5, I see traffic on eth2, eth3, and eth5, but nothing 
>> on eth4. This seems to be consistent accross a couple of systems I've 
>> tested; only the first card's second interface sees packets (e.g., with 
>> tcpdump). If I reboot with the sk98lin driver on the same kernel I see 
>> all traffic, as expected.
>
>Are the statistics changing? ie. ethtool -S eth4 and ifconfig eth4

Ok, I ran this for a lot longer and it seems less consistent than it did 
at first. It now appears that there is no correlation between a NIC not 
working and its order. In some cases the NICs both come up ok, and see 
traffic for a while. I left one example running over the weekend, and 
neither interface on one card was seeing traffic, and the interface 
counters weren't increasing. In another case, one interface on one NIC 
worked for a short period of time, then stopped. The interface counters 
would increase by a few packets every 30 seconds or so. Any kind of 
ethtool operation (e.g., ethtool -A eth4 autoneg off rx off tx off) 
would cause the interface to start seeing traffic again, then eventually 
go back to seeing only a few packets every few seconds.

Mike Stone