Re: 2.6.20-rc7: known regressions (v2) (part 1)

From: Adam Kropelin
Date: Sat Feb 03 2007 - 16:01:28 EST


Auke Kok wrote:
Adam Kropelin wrote:
I've never had this device work 100% with MSI on any kernel version
I've tested so far. But I'm not the original reporter of the
problem, and I believe for him it was a true regression where a
previous kernel wored correctly.

maybe I've been unclear, but here's how e1000 detects link changes:

1) by checking every 2 seconds in the watchdog by reading PHY
registers

That would explain why I see link status changes but 0 interrupt count in /proc/interrupts. However, on >= 2.6.19 the link state never changes. Ever. It's always down. On <= 2.6.18 the link state does change but with 0 interupt count.

2) by receiving an interrupt from the NIC with the LSI bit
in the interrupt control register

if the link is down to start with, the watchdog will obviously spot a
'link up' change since it doesn't use any interrupts.

This does not seem to work on 2.6.19+. Unless the watchdog interval is tens of minutes. I've waited at least 5 minutes and link never went up.

The behavior I observe on 2.6.19 is better than 2.6.20-rc7. Link
status interrupts seem to work but rx/tx does not. A few more
details here:
<http://www.kroptech.com/~adk0212/mailimport/showmsg.php?msg_id=3339092450&db_name=linux_kernel>

I'm going to test 2.6.16 thru 2.6.20-rc7 this weekend and will report
back any variations in behavior I notice.

that would be a good start, but I still think that you might have a
broken bridge on that system. Anyway, thanks for digging into this.

Will continue to dig.

--Adam

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