3x100Mbps bonding: works!

[Laurent Itti]

Hi all:

> Have you checked the performace of the three channel network yet.  When we
> tried using three channels we did not get as good of performace as the two
> channel setup, so that is what we have been using.

so far, it looks promising (using the first example command I found in the
netperf doc):

[root at iLab1 1]# done/netperf-2.1pl3/netperf -H 192.168.0.200 -t UDP_STREAM
-- -m 1024
UDP UNIDIRECTIONAL SEND TEST to 192.168.0.200
Socket  Message  Elapsed      Messages
Size    Size     Time         Okay Errors   Throughput
bytes   bytes    secs            #      #   10^6bits/sec

 65535    1024   9.99       275313      0     225.71
 65535           9.99       275209            225.63

I get 94 Mbps for a single (unbonded) channel (same as I saw posted at
netperf.org before buying the rtl8139 cards).  Note that this test did
crash the rtl8139 driver shipped with MDK-7.2beta3 (kernel 2.2.17).  But
it worked with the 8139too driver.  I'll try to see if I can pull out some
info from the crash and send a bug report.

I'll try other tests and other packet sizes, etc.  With a bit of tuning it
looks like this could really be very nice.  Combined with PVFS and other
tools, I think that I am going to like this cluster!

best regards,

  -- laurent