Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 124648
tg3 not recovering from disconnects
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:02 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8 Description of problem: IBM xSeries 445 with two NetXtreme gig fiber cards using "tg3" driver (with and without "bonding" driver). Networking becomes unstable when connectivity restored (after some interruption). When bonded, the switch will go "amber" on one of the NICs (seems to alternate). We can get decent network connection if we change config from 2 bonded NICs to 1 NIC (sometimes eth2, other times eth3, almost always alternating...coincides with "amber") Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-smp-2.4.21-15.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Bond 2 NICs 2. Disconnect cable (switch goes amber) 3. Reconnect cable (switch stays amber) Actual Results: SSH connection becomes choppy Expected Results: Degradation should have been minimal/unnoticable Additional info:
I've just finished looking over bonding.txt and I think I might see the problem. I don't believe our switches support modes 0,2,3,4 and I must be using the default (mode 0). I'd like to use "balance-alb" (presumbably that would be the best for an Oracle database server), but I don't know that the tg3 drivers supports this mode on our NIC (IBM NetXtreme 1000 SX Fiber a/k/a BCM5703). How can I find out what modes are supported, and what is a recommended value of miimon for each mode? -richard
Okay, I've tried the following in /etc/modules.conf: options bonding miimon=100 mode=balance-tlb options bonding miimon=100 mode=balance-alb options bonding miimon=100 mode=active-backup and all have produced the same error condition. FYI, these cards are linked to a Nortel Passport 8010 which, according to our network guy, has no support for link aggregation (which presumably prevents me from using any mode but these three). Out of curiosity, i rebooted the computer w/o bonding, so that I could have both switch lights stay green. I then changed to a bonding config: /etc/sysconfig/network:GATEWAYDEV=bond0 /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0:ONBOOT=yes /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth2:MASTER=bond0,ONBOOT=yes /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth3:MASTER=bond0,ONBOOT=yes restarted networking and both switch lights stayed green (one went amber for an instant, but back to green) I've had this condition before, but invariably, a network interruption would cause something to flake and my ssh connections would be choppy again. This is the first time I have it now that I'm trying "mode=balance-tlb". However, when I disconnect the cable and the switch light goes amber, it still stays amber when I reconnect. I ran an SSH session which started out fine, but suddenly disconnected. When I tried re-establishing, I couldn't even connect and a ping-to- switch I started on the server before disconnecting has suddenly begun losing packets. Help! -richard
This bug is filed against RHEL 3, which is in maintenance phase. During the maintenance phase, only security errata and select mission critical bug fixes will be released for enterprise products. Since this bug does not meet that criteria, it is now being closed. For more information of the RHEL errata support policy, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ If you feel this bug is indeed mission critical, please contact your support representative. You may be asked to provide detailed information on how this bug is affecting you.