Re: Status of drivers pi2.c pt.c

From: Hans Grobler (hxwww.utnhssoj@promise.com)
Date: Tue Oct 10 2000 - 09:55:31 EEST

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    On Mon, 9 Oct 2000, Richard Adams wrote:
    > On Mon, 09 Oct 2000, Niall Parker wrote about , Re: Status of drivers pi2.c pt.c:
    >
    > > I just switched one of our rf routers (using a PI2 card) from 2.0.37 with
    > > the pi driver to 2.2.13 with the dmascc driver. While it seems to run OK
    > > on a P75, the new stuff didn't seem to work as well as the pi driver on
    > > a couple of 386's ... (lost packets due to Tx overuns). This may not be
    > > the dmascc drivers fault per se though, as I recall trying both the pi and
    > > dmascc drivers earlier with a 2.0 kernel and they seemed equivalent.
    >
    > I have several machines running a PA0HZP compatable scc using the normall
    > scc.c driver from Joerg DL1BKE, i can say that the slower the PC is the
    > better they work.
    >
    > I even have a P2 200 with 64 megs which has a SCSi drive, i "still get"
    > many Rxover and Txunderuns. I must say i have 2 ethernet cards as well,
    > which could well contribute to the problem
    >
    > When i used a 486/dx2 66 with 16megs of ram the amounts were "much smaller".
    > Another problem is the amount of corrupt callsigns which appier in the
    > mheard list, in that machine i only has one ethernet card. However i can
    > live with it all as the systems i have keep running and "seldumly have
    > problems".

    We have, amongst other, an original PA0HZP here and don't see particularly
    high Rxover and Txunderuns. The machines I've used are: Pentium 60,
    Pentium 233 and a Celeron 333. The second one had IDE and the others
    SCSI. All the machines have a single 10BaseT network card. Kernel 2.2.x.

    Be that as it may, it does not surprise me that there are variations in
    packet loss characteristics between the various scc drivers and cards (and
    due to the machines they are used in). The scc IC's are (at least in my
    opinion) particularly sensitive to interrupt latencies and I/O sequencing.

    As a side note, there also seems to be anomalies with the 2.4.x kernels
    and I'm still trying to get a handle on. For example, under certain
    conditions, the scc.c driver will cause an OOPS and kill the machine. This
    seems to be related to the new threading of the network layers.

    -- Hans

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