Re: Tulip or De4X5 driver?

["Mohan" <mkannapa ford com>]

Greetings,
 Here is my take on it. Our cluster has a master node which is a DS10.
 And then we have bunch of slates (DS10L), all networked with couple
 of Nortel 100-BT switches. Unfortunately, the switch can do 100-BT FD
 *only* if the SRM is set to Auto-Negotiate. I tried both the tulip,
 de4x5, old_tulip, no go, I could not get it to talk 100-BT FD. The tulip
 could do FD, but then my master node (DS10), has two interfaces, one
 for the "internal" LAN (connected to the Nortel Switch) and the other
 connected to a CISCO router (external IP). Anyways, I tried a whole lot
 of combinations, the tulip would work FD with the CISCO router when
 set to Auto, but could not get it to work FD with  the Nortel (auto).
 Eventually settled on de4x5 with half duplex.
 There were two options: (apart from getting rid of the DE500's that comes
 with the slates which is integrated :()
 - Either get a different switch where you can manually set the stupid
   speed on each port.
 - Or, somehow get the linux kernel to load different driver for each
   interface even though they have the same chip). I do not know whether
   this can be done?

 Fortunately, we do not use the internal network much, so it has not been
 a big deal.

 Cheers
 Mohan
 

On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Mike Barnes wrote:

> gshamov wrote:
> > We have a cluster built from eight DS10L machines (under RedHat 6.2
> > Linux-Alpha),linked with Fast 100mb Ethernet  switcher.
> 
> I spent a year (on and off - mostly off) getting a cluster of 7 DS10s to
> work happily. Finally managed it about a month ago.
> 
> > 1) Is it possible to aquire full-duplex, 100MB network performance for
> >    our hardware configuration?
> 
> I'm guessing there's not much difference between the DS10 and DS10L, so
> I'd say "yes".
> 
> > 2) Which network card driver gives better performance -- Generic
> >    DE4X5 or Tulip? And how to configure these drivers for maximum
> >    network speed? We have experimented with both of them, using
> >    kernels 2.2.18 and 2.4.2 -- it seems that its impossible to have
> >    Full-Duplex with DE4X5... But it seems that network with FDX Tulip
> >    is slower than in case of Half-Duplex De4X5... What shoulde we do
> >    wit it?!!
> 
> We settled on the Tulip, eventually.
> 
> > May be someone there had such a experience with these DS10L systems?
> > Any suggestions will be gratefully appericated!
> 
> I'm going to start by guessing that you have a switch that tries to
> autosense link speed, am I right? If your switch ports can be manaually
> forced to run at 100Mbps/Full Duplex, then do so and it might all be
> fine right now. Otherwise, here's the distilled wisdom ...
> 
> 
> 1) Install the latest firmware update.
> 
> 2) In SRM, set ewa0_mode (or whatever adapter) to "FastFD".
> 
> 3) Fix the Tulip driver! Stephen Degler sent the following to this list
> on January 29th this year. It was not applied to the 2.4.1 kernel
> sources, I don't know about 2.4.2. I _think_ the same problem exists in
> 2.2.x kernels in a similar form, but I haven't looked lately.
> 
> > This one-liner fixes a subtle 21143 autonegotiation problem for me on a Zynx
> > quad card.  The driver would claim to negotiate 100-FD, but would report late
> > collisions and bad transmit throughput.
> > 
> > The driver still allows packets to be transmitted during autonegotiation,
> > but that only drops a few packets.
> > 
> > skd
> > 
> > --- 21142.c.bad Sun Jan 28 15:26:25 2001
> > +++ 21142.c     Sun Jan 28 11:51:59 2001
> > @@ -171,7 +171,7 @@
> >                         for (i = 0; i < tp->mtable->leafcount; i++)
> >                                 if (tp->mtable->mleaf[i].media == dev->if_port) {
> >                                         tp->cur_index = i;
> > -                                       tulip_select_media(dev, 0);
> > +                                       tulip_select_media(dev, 1);
> >                                         setup_done = 1;
> >                                         break;
> >                                 }
> 
> Give that lot a try. Feel free to email me direct on this - I know what
> you're going through. :)
> 
> Mike.
> 
> 
> 
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