Subject: Re: A few Sun4m changes
To: None <neil@domino.org>
From: Rob Healey <rhealey@helios.mn.org>
List: port-sparc
Date: 04/26/1996 10:05:30
> > 	The 10 is notorious for it's braindamaged ledma device that causes
> > 	ALOT of grief. Apparently the rev of ethernet controller in most
> > 	10's is basically hopeless.
> > 
> > 	ledma devices in sun4m boxes in general cause a higher interrupt load
> > 	than the buffered versions but only that, i.e. I know of no other
> > 	sun4m ledma design that has the serious braindamage of the 10's...
> > 
> > 	For the 10 it's a matter of survival to avoid the motherboard
> > 	ethernet. For all other sun4m's it's a performance issue.
> > 
> > 	The problem has to do to the way the ether controller on the 10
> > 	locks up the sbus solid when too much traffic is on the network.
> > 	The "silent death" syndrome...
> > 
> > 	On a lightly loaded net the 10 is usually OK, any significant
> > 	NFS traffic to/from the box is usually enough to lock it up
> > 	solid.
> > 
> Yes this confirms what I knew, Bassically the solution to both these
> problems is to have a script that pings other machines on your net. Select
> 3 machines and if you don't get a reply then ifconfig le0 down; ifconfig
> le0 up. This works reasonably well.
> 
	The real solution if you can't find some sucker^h^h^h^h^h^hbuyer
	to take the 10 off your hands is to use the buffered scsi/ether
	card.

	On most of the systems I've tried the cron/ping trick it has done little
	good, it almost always locked up solid relatively quickly although it
	lasted some amount of time longer than without the cron/ping trick.
	I'll temper this with the fact that all the networks I've ever used a
	10 on had EXTREMELY high traffic rates... The end solution was to ditch
	the 10's although the buffered cards allowed the 10's to be used till
	they could be decommissioned.

	My end personal, and biased, opinion on the subject is that a
	10 has no real business on a heavily used net using it's motherboard
	ether. It should work OK as a workstation at home though assuming
	you don't have much traffic on the home network.

		-Rob