[Atlas-anchors-pilot] Heads-up about new HW specs

[Colin Petrie]

Hi Nick,

Thank you for the information - I have experienced some of the
limitations of the 82754 chips before, but you have pointed out some
useful extra ones, we will consider this in our testing.

Regards,
Colin


On 8/30/13 12:04 AM, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> On 29/08/2013 15:59, Vesna Manojlovic wrote:
>> we are currently testing:
>> - Soekris box net6501-70 Board
>> - in 1U 19 Inch Rackmount Case
>> - and 128 GB SSD SLC
> 
> we have a couple of 6501-30 units in production at INEX.  They are very
> good at what they do, and the power draw is a major attraction for us.  But
> before the RIPE NCC makes a commitment to using them, I would recommend
> benchmarking them very carefully with either packet generators or else mgen
> (http://downloads.pf.itd.nrl.navy.mil/mgen/) to make sure that you
> understand their throughput and pps limitations.  I haven't benchmarked the
> 6501 units yet, but the previous generation Soekris 5501 units start
> dropping packets at ~10 mbit/sec or 4000 pps, which ever comes first.  The
> 6501 units will behave much better than this, but I don't have figures for
> them.
> 
> Also, the default ethernet cards on these boxes are based on the Intel
> 82574 chipset.  There are some really nasty bugs on this chipset and even
> on a modern bus on a big machine, they will start dropping packets at
> around 400 mbit/sec in their default configuration.  You can work around
> with some of this brokenness by disabling active state power management.
> On linux this can be done using the following command:
> 
>> bash# for i in `lspci | grep 82574 | awk '{print $1}'`; do setpci -s ${i} CAP_EXP+10.b=40; done
> 
> Dunno what the freebsd equivalent is, but I'm sure it's as obvious as the
> linux fix.  I haven't got them to reliable handle iperf >= 650mbit/sec on
> any configuration, but obviously ripe anchor nodes won't need to do this
> amount of traffic so it won't be an issue.
> 
> The testing I've done on 82574 based ethernet cards was not done on soekris
> kit, btw.
> 
> Also you would want to confirm that these cards don't suffer from:
> 
> http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html
> 
> Nick
> 
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