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PLA-Support>Sun Systems>SAND>Network>SN-SND: Sun Network Interfaces
 

***Checked for relevance on 16-Jan-2018***

In this Document

Symptoms

Changes

Cause

Solution

References

Created from <SR 3-5959208691>

Applies to:

Symptoms

We are seeing warning message below on a number of our M5000's (not on our M3000's) for both 0x16 & 0x17.
It appears when our audit script runs.
If we stop the script running in background the message does not appear.

Changes

Software enquiring  the link status of unused bge interfaces was running.

Cause

The symptoms we see are similar to

Bug 15500387 - SUNBT6735471-SOLARIS_11 Spurious interrupts happen on bge with SunVTS netlbtest

It happens with otherwise unused interfaces when chip functions on the bge chip get accessed
and the chip response involves an interrupt. The message is harmless and can be ignored.

In your script this mentioned chip access is needed e.g with
/usr/bin/kstat -p
/usr/sbin/dladm show-link
/usr/sbin/dladm show-dev

When using dladm we ask the chip hardware for certain features or status.
By enumerating also unused ports we ask even for accessing unused bge hardware.

Now, as the interface is not used, the bge driver is configured not to handle interrupts.
I know of other drivers even handling requests when not being used,
but this was deprecated as it uses system ressources for unused interfaces
(unneeded performance impact).
bge is more ressource aware here, but this leads to this message.

Solution

So what we can do here

- install bge <patch 144563-02> or higher to get fix for for less bge logging,
<Bug 15651935> SUNBT6963866 running dladm show-link against unplumbed bge interfaces creates link down notice messages
  and dladm <patch 148328-03> or higher for less dladm show-link involvement,
<Bug 15795832> dladm show-link calls mac_start() unnecessarily

- install bge <patch 150294-02> or higher for additional PCIe and PHY related fixes

- ignore the messages (which is safe)

- uncomment the offending command(s)

- use different checks :

The easiest method to check for link status on used interfaces only is

% ifconfig -a | grep flags | grep -v RUNNING

... which would then list all used but down interfaces (so normally empty).

You can also check for link down messages in the messages file.

(Internal Only)
The above issue describes a timing issue related to bge and PCI for unused interfaces.
If the above fixes are installed, and similar symptoms are seen for used interfaces, there are more (not-network related) timing issues.
They are due to the layered/shared PCIe/PCI structure of OPL systems.

See Sun SPARC(R) Enterprise M3000/M4000/M5000/M8000/M9000 (OPL) Servers: Current Issues Page <Document 1315765.1>
Issue "BGE performance fails to meet expectations"

See also OPL "Just The Facts" https://retriever.us.oracle.com/public/sunwin/docs/498977.pdf page 31 :
The gigabit Ethernet ports on the BASE IO I/O card (IOUA) are intended for providing basic administrative networking connectivity for the domain. As a shared storage and networking device it cannot provide the same level of networking performance as a dedicated networking card.

Use dedicated PCI-E networking cards for optimal application networking performance.

References

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