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Does the Netxen driver work?

DISCUSSION Ben Greear 3 participants 5 messages Jul 6, 2007 – Jul 10, 2007

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Ben Greear

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#0 lore raw

Hello!

I just got some Netxen 10Gbe CX4 adapters and put them into freshly updated Fedora 7 64-bit systems. So far, I am not having much luck.

Kernel is: Official F7 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7

NIC:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: NetXen Incorporated NXB-10GCX4 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe Adapter with CX4 copper interface (rev 25)

The motherboard chipset is Intel based (I can provide more info is someone cares..but I first wanted to make sure there are no well-known issues.)

Interesting boot messages:

Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: unable to allocate MSI interrupt error
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: XGbE board initialized

Is that MSI error fatal?

The two NICs are connected by a CX4 cable, and from dmesg output, it appears they have negotiated link properly.

However, I see tx counters incrementing on both sides, but no rx counters.

I will try the latest 22-pre kernel in the meantime, but if anyone has any experience getting these NICs to work, I'm interested to know about it.

Thanks,
Ben

Signature · 2 lines
Ben Greear <[email protected]>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
author
#1 lore raw
Quoted 4 lines · Ben Greear

Hello!

I just got some Netxen 10Gbe CX4 adapters and put them into freshly updated Fedora 7 64-bit systems. So far, I am not having much luck.

Ahh, 22-pre-7 seems to work much better..no MSI errors and traffic is passing fine.

Ben

Signature · 2 lines
Ben Greear <[email protected]>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com
#2 lore raw
In reply to Ben Greear
Quoted 16 lines · Ben Greear

Hello!

I just got some Netxen 10Gbe CX4 adapters and put them into freshly updated Fedora 7 64-bit systems. So far, I am not having much luck.

Kernel is: Official F7 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7

NIC:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: NetXen Incorporated NXB-10GCX4 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe Adapter with CX4 copper interface (rev 25)

The motherboard chipset is Intel based (I can provide more info is someone cares..but I first wanted to make sure there are no well-known issues.)

Interesting boot messages:

Quoted 8 lines
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] ->
GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: unable to allocate MSI
interrupt error
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: XGbE board initialized

Is that MSI error fatal?

Try kernel option "pci=msi".

MSI causes so many problems in 2.6.20/2.6.21 that Fedora turned it off by default.

#3 lore raw
In reply to Ben Greear

The MSI error wasn't fatal, so it was suppressed in recent fixes for 2.6.22-rc7. The driver in 2.6.21 had many bugs, but I ain't sure if recent fixes are going to be pulled in Fedora kernel.

-Dhananjay

Quoted 36 lines · Ben Greear

Hello!

I just got some Netxen 10Gbe CX4 adapters and put them into freshly updated Fedora 7 64-bit systems. So far, I am not having much luck.

Kernel is: Official F7 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7

NIC:
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: NetXen Incorporated NXB-10GCX4 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe Adapter with CX4 copper interface (rev 25)

The motherboard chipset is Intel based (I can provide more info is someone cares..but I first wanted to make sure there are no well-known issues.)

Interesting boot messages:

Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] ->
GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: unable to allocate MSI
interrupt error
Jul  5 16:15:17 a440-dc kernel: netxen-nic: XGbE board initialized

Is that MSI error fatal?

The two NICs are connected by a CX4 cable, and from dmesg output, it appears
they have negotiated link properly.

However, I see tx counters incrementing on both sides, but no rx counters.

I will try the latest 22-pre kernel in the meantime, but if anyone has any experience getting these NICs to work, I'm interested to know about it.

Thanks,
Ben

#4 lore raw
Quoted 4 lines · Dhananjay Phadke

The MSI error wasn't fatal, so it was suppressed in recent fixes for 2.6.22-rc7. The driver in 2.6.21 had many bugs, but I ain't sure if recent fixes are going to be pulled in Fedora kernel.

Fedora 6/7 are moving to kernel 2.6.22 very soon.