e1000 & 802.3ad bonding

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09-04-2009, 01:22 PM
mcr

e1000 & 802.3ad bonding

Hi!

We have two DSS 5.0up62.7102.3518 64bit 8TB servers here, each with four Intel Gigabit NICs:
2 x Onboard Intel Corporation 80003ES2LAN Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper) (rev 01)
2 x Intel Corporation 82546GB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03)

All NICs use the e1000 driver and are bonded pairwise to 802.3ad channel bonds.

The "onboard" bonds are connected to a LAG configured with LCAP/802.3ad on a Netgear GS748Tv3 switch. The PCIe adapter bonds connect (with crossover cables) the two Open-E servers for data replication.

As we had a severe crash after one week of uptime, I want to find out, whether we have to change something in the setup before going online again. The broken snapshots have already been repaired by the remote support (Thanks for this!), but I still don't have a faintest idea why the server crashed during data replication.

My question:
Should we switch back to 32-bit mode?
Are there any problems reported for the e1000 NIC driver in 64-bit mode?
Or for 802.3ad bonding devices: Should we use a different bonding (balance-rr)?

Best regards,
-mcr
09-04-2009, 06:08 PM
To-M

Unless you have less then 4GB of mem I would not switch to 32bit mode as I have not seen issues with 64bit and the Intel - in fact you need 64bit mode to work with Intel's I/O AT for performance.

I have in some cases seen strange issues with 802.3ad (not sure if it is NIC or switch or Jumbo) and would recommend the Balance rr to test. Most of the crashes that I have seen have been hw releated but I would need to investigate the ticket where you sent in the logs.
09-07-2009, 09:37 AM
mcr

Hi Todd!

Quote:

Originally Posted by To-M

Unless you have less then 4GB of mem I would not switch to 32bit mode as I have not seen issues with 64bit and the Intel - in fact you need 64bit mode to work with Intel's I/O AT for performance.

We have 8GB memory for each server. And actutally, the Intel I/O AT was the reason, why we switched to the 64bit version.

Quote:

Originally Posted by To-M

I have in some cases seen strange issues with 802.3ad (not sure if it is NIC or switch or Jumbo) and would recommend the Balance rr to test. Most of the crashes that I have seen have been hw releated but I would need to investigate the ticket where you sent in the logs.

The ticket number is #1010828. The case should include a full set of logfiles. Thanks for the hint with the balance-rr. If the error occurs again, I will reconfigure the Netgear switch and change all bonds to balance-rr.

Best regards,
-mcr