Via SN10000EG *INFO*

[A Hired Goon]

This is just a note for other users that may be setting up one of these new boards (the 18000 should be same except the speed).

I experienced some difficuties setting up the gigabit ethernet (via velocity).

***To activate the velocity option in 1000 ethernet you must select the via driver in the 100 ethernet menu***

Issues: rx memory allocation failures of various time lengths (dependent on my settings in sysctl.conf and frame sizing). Without tweaking there were issues as well. Tried many combinations of bios and kernel settings.

Problem Kernels: ( gentoo sources) 2.6.19-r5, 2.6.21-r4.

WORKING: 2.6.24

Note: I did not try any between 21 and 24. This board was replacing another in an iscsi target system (which was previously using the 2.6.19 kernel). iscsitarget was easier to setup on these kernels (since it works with current ebuilds). I had read that there were some changes done to the velocity driver in 24 so I decided to try it. I have not had any problems transferring files to and from it so far (scp and nfs). The transfer to it usually died between 1G and 6G. I have since transfered ~60G and no issues.

I do not have ISCSI working with it yet (looking for patches and such). But will report back once I get that setup.


Performance is quite low for a 16 drive array. Knowing a via 1ghz is slower (was a 2.8 PentiumD previously), I did expect more (currently a quick cat $FILE > /dev/null test is ~25MB/s and NFS reads/writes ~30-50). Yes, not a benchmark by any standard, but a rough gauge. Performance tweaking will also be done in addition to the iscsi (new bios flash, bios settings etc).


AHG