Common Linux Driver selection for Dell servers

Common Linux Driver selection for Dell servers-Linux Enterprise Application-Linux server application information. The following is a detailed description. The main driver is Nic and RAID card. Generally, you can use commands such as lspci, lsmod (module driver), and dmesg.

1. 1X50 series:

1750 RAID card Fusion MPT device support -- Fusion MPT (base + ScsiHost) drivers
Nic 2 tg3. Broadcom Tigon3 support (integrated card)
1850 -- the CPU is IA32E or EM64T, which can be used as 32-bit or AMD64 (x86_64.
RAID card megaraid2.AMI MegaRAID2 support
Nic 2 e1000 Intel (R) PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet support

2. 2X50 series:

2650 RAID card aacraid Adaptec AACRAID support (EXPERIMENTAL)
Two tg3 e1000 NICs (e1000 slots) (some old models are eepro100)
EtherExpressPro/100 support (eepro100, original Becker driver)
2850 RAID card megaraid2. AMI MegaRAID2 support
Nic 4 e1000.Intel (R) PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet support
At present, dell's server is generally used for e1000. Use e1000don't forget to open this Use Rx Polling (NAPI)

3. 6650 RAID card megaraid2 (old one with megaraid) AMI MegaRAID2 support

Two e1000 Nic and two tg3.

We use dell's poweredge servers, with a maximum of 750, 1650, and 1850 servers. Some time ago, the 750 and 1850 network adapters experienced overflow multiple times. In particular, a server with a large network traffic experienced packet loss almost every second. Then, I made unremitting and fruitful adjustments to the intel Nic parameters integrated into the motherboard, mainly including RX Descriptors, TX Descriptors, and Interrupt Throttle Rate, RX Interrupt Delay and RX Absolute Interrupt Delay are also tested. The number of packet loss is very low, but it cannot be eliminated. It is useless to call dell Technical Support.

Finally, I found an intel site Nic performance report and finally found the answer to this question. Intel's Nic performance reports boast of course how excellent its Nic performance is, but the measured parameters listed in show us that intel's 82541 chip is based on a 32-bit PCI bus, although the theoretical value exceeds 1 Gbps bandwidth, when it operates at a 33 MHz PCI standard frequency, it cannot reach two-way 2 Gbps traffic. In fact, the actual measurement result is only about Mbps. This is the reason. The IP address data volume on my dell750 Nic exceeds 90 MBps, and the average packet size is about bytes, after calculating the overhead, the actual traffic has reached or even exceeded the load limit of a PCI bus, so packet loss is hard to avoid. The dell750 two integrated Gigabit NICs are based on different chipset, one port is the CSA bus 82541, and the other two ports are the PCI bus. After I transfer a high-load network cable to one port, no Nic overflow error occurs. Dell1850 is miserable, and both integrated Gigabit NICs are based on 82541. Therefore, to make full use of up to 1 GB network interfaces, only 64-bit PCI NICs Based on 82545 or 82546 are purchased.

The lessons learned from this incident are:

1. Although the same device is seen in the OS and the driver is fully compatible, the performance of the device may be different.

2. for high-performance GE NICs, the 32-bit PCI bus is outdated, while the CPU processing capability is more than enough.

In addition, the same is true for broadcom 5703 and 5705. 5705 is based on a 32-bit PCI bus and is also a pseudo GE Nic.