On Sat, 10 Jul 1999, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 09, 1999 at 08:57:33PM -0700, Hal Murray wrote:

> > This is not an Alpha-only problem.  It happens on Intel boxes too. 
> > (It also happens on FreeBSD - same driver.) 
> > 
> > 
> > I've had good luck with Intel 82558 cards (fxp).
> > 
> > 
> > Can anybody confirm that older versions of the Tulip (21140?) work 
> > at 100/full?  If so, that might give somebody a good hint to track 
> > this down. 
> 
> I have tulip boards (21140 and 21141) working at 100Mbs FD. But for the
> 21140 I had to hardwire the board and switch. The negociation would
> pick 10Mb/HD otherwise.
> No problems with the 21141 (at last with my 3com switches :)

(Mike - mts@off.to and I work together, so I'm speaking up for a
second...)

In our setup, no apparent combination of switch, hub, direct wire, full,
half duplex, Tulip or Intel card appears to work properly with our 164LX
boxes.

It seems that lots of people report partial or complete success with other
boxes, but after a tremendous amount of time trying many, many different
combinations (all with 164LX 533MHz alphas), we are simply unable to get
good symmetric performance, or even adequate performance.

Is anyone else running two 164LX 533MHz (or greater) boxes on the same hub
or switch both running netbsd 1.4, both with dec 21140, 21143 or intel
etherexpress cards?  If so, do you get equal performance doing a large get
vs a put via ftp between the two machines?

We do not, and for the life of us, we are completely unable to get this
working properly.  It is remotely possible that we're doing something
wrong, or truly are just seeing the effects of a poor driver
implementation (e.g. the reported problems with 21143 tulip).  I know
we're not stupid, and I know we don't have subtle hardware problems -
we've got 10 164LX rackmount boxes that we are trying to use as a
supercompter cluster - they all show the same behavior very consistently.  
This makes our cluster worth approximately nothing to us, and it is
getting extremely frustrating.

Again, any suggestions what we might try would be greatly welcome.  If it
comes down to it, I'll ship some of these mothers somewhere if that will
help (or work with someone remotely).  Their next stop is pretty much the
dumpster.

Paul

+------------------------------------------------------+
| Paul Anderson           Public Data Queries, Inc.    |
| pha@pdq.com             734-213-4964(W) 994-3734(H)  |
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