I also been having some painful experience with the broadcom cards on HP Proliant DL140,DL360 and DL580. The bcm5700 driver worked a lot better for me than the tg3 driver. If I do not recall wrong there is still a outstanding bug on the tg3 driver when it locks up under load(bugzilla.redhat.com). So I wouldn't recommend the tg3 driver. I discovered that if you changes the MTU on the tg3 driver on the fly you usually just lock up the complete network stack and have to reboot. Well at least on the RH8.0 kernel 2.4.20-24.8... The bcm5700 driver works better here, but RH80 doesn't provide that module by default in the latest kernels, since Jeff Garzik thinks the bcm5700 driver is too buggy and the tg3 driver is the way to go.... Yeh right... /Magnus On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 18:07, Michael James wrote:
On Thursday 19 February 2004 11:46, MarkusBergh@boystown.com.au wrote:
I have an xSeries 225 server with Suse 9 Pro that locks up. Its a Broadcom BCM5703 card and I have installed the latest driver from Broadcom.
Any advice would be appreciated especialy anything specific to the Broadcom BCM5703 card and its driver (BCM5700).
We use Dell PowerEdge 2650 and 1655MC servers here. They both have Broadcom 5700 ethernet onboard.
There has been a lot of discussion, (and angst) on the linux-poweredge@dell.com list.
Have a look at the archives at:
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/
Search for 5700 or tg3 or broadcom.
One thread of the discussion seems to say suse is immune to the (huge) lockup problems that have troubled redhat users. Another suggests that the tg3 driver is better than the bcm5700.
I have been using the stock suse (8.1, 8.2 and 9.0) tg3 drivers in a network intensive situation, and beyond a bit of tweaking network timeouts in /proc/net/ip/... it has worked fine for me.
However there is a strong body of opinion that broadcom cards are a load of sh*t, so if it's not soldered to the motherboard, (as mine are) consider doing yourself a big favour and get a real (intel) network card.
A friend across the road built a router/firewall out of a Dell 2650. He got worse performance out of Gigabit broadcom than he was used to out of 100 Meg intel. It killed video-conferencing completely, where it worked OK before. Replaced both ports with intel 1000MX cards and it's been rock solid lightning ever since. ( To mix a metaphor completely)
My $.02 michaelj
-- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166