Subject: s2io: packet reordering with 2.6.25.4

From: Tom Quetchenbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:11:16 -0700

We've been encountering some packet reordering with our Neterion 10
Gigabit Ethernet-SR cards using the s2io driver in linux 2.6.25.4.

We have a WAN testbed with the Neterion cards in two dual-processor AMD
Opteron machines; when the machines are connected back-to-back we start
to encounter reordering when sending UDP traffic at over 500 Mbit/s.
(This is synthetic traffic generated with iperf, which reports how many
datagrams are received out-of-order.)

We also see the problem when sending iperf TCP traffic from a machine
with an e1000 gigabit card to the Neterion card via a Cisco 7609 router.
It seems to be related to the burstiness of the traffic, as inserting an
intermediate 2.5Gbit/s POS link seems to reduce the reordering, and
inserting a gigabit ethernet link eliminates it.

We see reordering with 64-bit and 32-bit kernels, but possibly more with
the 32-bit kernel.

Is this a known issue? Is there anything that I can do to debug it
further? (I'm fairly familiar with the Linux TCP stack, but pretty much
a newbie when it comes to debugging network device drivers.)

Thanks, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help debug,
-Tom

Some possibly relevant information:

NAPI is enabled; LRO is disabled. The s2io module is loaded with default
settings.

lspci, .config, and some other info are available here:
http://wil-ns.cs.caltech.edu/~quetchen/s2io-reordering/

After loading the s2io module, dmesg output is:
PM: Writing back config space on device 0000:03:01.0 at offset 1 (was
2300142, writing 2300146)
eth2: Enabling MSIX failed
eth2: MSI-X requested but failed to enable
Copyright(c) 2002-2007 Neterion Inc.
eth2: Neterion 10 Gigabit Ethernet-SR PCI-X 2.0 DDR Adapter (rev 2)
eth2: Driver version 2.0.26.22
eth2: MAC ADDR: 00:0c:fc:00:0d:22
SERIAL NUMBER: SXT0541048
eth2: Device is on 64 bit 133MHz PCIX(M1) bus
eth2: 1-Buffer receive mode enabled
eth2: Interrupt type INTA
eth2: Link down

Here's a sample of the output we see from iperf:
[quetchen@fast-2 ~]$ iperf -usi1 -w10M
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on UDP port 5001
Receiving 1470 byte datagrams
UDP buffer size: 9.54 MByte (WARNING: requested 10.0 MByte)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.4.72.2 port 5001 connected with 10.4.72.3 port 42532
[  3]  0.0- 1.0 sec    279 MBytes  2.34 Gbits/sec  0.004 ms   65/198856
[  3]  0.0- 1.0 sec  65 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  1.0- 2.0 sec    278 MBytes  2.33 Gbits/sec  0.004 ms   60/198413
[  3]  1.0- 2.0 sec  60 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  2.0- 3.0 sec    279 MBytes  2.34 Gbits/sec  0.004 ms   87/199063
[  3]  2.0- 3.0 sec  87 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  3.0- 4.0 sec    279 MBytes  2.34 Gbits/sec  0.004 ms   50/198882
[  3]  3.0- 4.0 sec  50 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  4.0- 5.0 sec    276 MBytes  2.32 Gbits/sec  0.004 ms    0/197179
[  3]  5.0- 6.0 sec    270 MBytes  2.27 Gbits/sec  0.001 ms  127/192705
[  3]  5.0- 6.0 sec  127 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  6.0- 7.0 sec    279 MBytes  2.34 Gbits/sec  0.001 ms   71/198909
[  3]  6.0- 7.0 sec  71 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  7.0- 8.0 sec    277 MBytes  2.32 Gbits/sec  0.003 ms   18/197584
[  3]  7.0- 8.0 sec  18 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  8.0- 9.0 sec    280 MBytes  2.35 Gbits/sec  0.015 ms   41/199648
[  3]  8.0- 9.0 sec  41 datagrams received out-of-order
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  2.71 GBytes  2.33 Gbits/sec  0.002 ms  519/1979857
[  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  520 datagrams received out-of-order