[DRBD-user] DRBD serious locking due to TOE

[Florian Haas]

Ben,

On Friday 14 December 2007 16:09:44 Ben Clewett wrote:
> Hi Dr J Pelan,
>
> My name sake Ben Lavender solved his similar problem by entirely
> disabling ToE, by removing a form of jumper on the NIC PCB.
>
> I am still trying the fix Florian suggested.  However this has made no
> difference yet.
>
> Since I have the same chip set as Ben, all be it on a different NIC, I
> think this suggests some bug on the NIC card firmware.  (Since DELL
> actually added a jumper to their NIC to disable ToE, it might suggest
> they are worried about it's effect on the NIC, despite the drivers used.
>   But on the from HP version...)

OK, if you are really suspecting a hardware issue, and before you accidentally 
run off on an irrelevant tangent, try to establish whether Ben Lavender's 
issue really applies to you. Maybe he can jump in on this if he's still 
monitoring the list. A few things that come to mind:

- Ben mentiones "onboard Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet NICs" in his 
August/September thread. I don't think he ever mentioned his actual chipset, 
or even whether he's using the bnx2 or the old tg3 driver.

- You mention "NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-SX" cards.
  1. This is a FO card, not a copper interface like Ben's.
  2. I believe the chipset identifier you mentioned is wrong, should 
be "BCM5708S". Whether or not these differ greatly from their copper sibling 
in chipset terms I don't know.
  3. I know of at least a revision 11 and 12 I've seen of that chipset 
recently, so find out what revision your hardware is and attempt to correlate 
with Ben's.

- Ben's system ran with SELinux enabled, I don't know if yours does.

> There is a new version of the firmware out there which I have just
> found, so this must be my next option....

Possibly, but as I said be warned not to draw premature conclusions from 
similarities to an earlier issue someone mentioned on this list, whose 
circumstances may or may not match yours. YMMV. Please share your results.

Florian

-- 
: Florian G. Haas
: LINBIT Information Technologies GmbH
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