[vortex] problem on debian

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, [iso-8859-1] Jürgen Sandner wrote:

> kernel: eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e401

Trying to use a search engine to look for the message (without the 
numerical value at the end) gives _lots_ of results. Even with the 
numerical value (which is 3c59x specific) you still get enough.

As I often repeated on this list, the problem is that the system becomes 
too slow to process the network packets. This might mean that the system 
is too slow in general or that the network interrupt doesn't come through 
when it's raised, the CPU being blocked for too long in other interrupts.
There are two ways of dealing with this:
- try to make it happen less frequent: increase the "max_interrupt_work" 
module parameter, maybe coupled with increasing the Rx (and maybe Tx) ring 
sizes (this requires modifying the driver and recompiling)
- try to fix the problem. Based on the interrupt list, my guess is that 

>   9:     875049          XT-PIC  aic7xxx, usb-uhci

is the place where the CPU is spending too much time.

I would suggest to first try to get the two devices to not share an 
interrupt (suggestions for this were also given on this list and many 
others). Then try to find out why the device spends too much time there - 
changing the SCSI controller to a different brand (and driver) might help 
here. Saying the the 3Com card/driver is at fault is not realistic - as 
you can find through search engine results, these network cards are not 
the only ones giving this message...

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu@IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De