*BSD News Article 52399


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From: james@raid.us.dell.com (James Van Artsdalen)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: performance problems with intel etherexpress/bsdi 2.0.1/intel p6
Date: 8 Oct 1995 22:29:16 -0500
Organization: Dell Computer Corporation
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <45a4uc$f83@raid.us.dell.com>
References: <DG5CL5.FLI@world.std.com>
Reply-To: james@raid.us.dell.com (James Van Artsdalen)
NNTP-Posting-Host: raid.us.dell.com
Keywords: poor performance

In <DG5CL5.FLI@world.std.com>, mis@world.std.com (Mark Seiden) wrote:

> for a special event (see http://www.1010.org) we are trying
> to get 2.0.1 running on a p6 with an intel ex board.
> 
> at the moment ftp performance is around 1kB/sec.  yucko.
> the behavior is bursty.  transfers a few kB then times out.

You need to give more detail on the peripheral cards.
One wonders if there is a bus master / DMA device in the
system and if the (brand new, beta) chipset/CPU is handling
these sorts of cycles correctly.

I would personally break out the logic analyzer at this point
and look at the PCI or ISA bus for constipation of some sort.

If none of the peripherals are bus master or DMA, then another
possibility is that some delay loops are running too fast in the
kernel device driver.  Perhaps a non-Intel NIC would work better:
The SMC NIC's work fine in my 133 MHz P-5.
The 3com NIC's seem to get kernel error messages about the "FIFO"
occasionally, but I'm told this does no harm(???).
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james@dell.com            "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759-7299    512-728-8789