Dell PowerEdge SC1435 Installing Broadcom NetXtreme Drivers and TOE - Page 8

Linux High-Stress Environments Running Multiple NetXtreme II Adapters In high-stress Linux environments running multiple NetXtreme II NICs, the Broadcom 5708 network connection may run out of receive buffers. The default receive descriptor ring size for a 5708 connection is 100. If network traffic shows excessive dropped packets and connection timeouts, increase the size of the receive description ring using the following command string. ethtool -G ethn rx size where n is the number of the Ethernet channel and size is the new size of the receive description ring. The following example changes the receive ring size for eth0 to 400: ethtool -G eth0 rx 400 When prompted to verify the change, enter the following command: ethtool -g eth0 To make the updated receive descriptor ring setting permanent, do the following: • For Red Hat® Linux®, add the ethtool entry to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. • For SUSE® Linux, perform the following procedure: a Add the following to the interface configuration file in /etc/sysconfig/network. POST_UP_SCRIPT=set_ring_size b Create a set_ring_size script file with the following commands and place it in /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts. #!/bin/bash ethtool -G ethn rx size where n is the number of the Ethernet channel and size is the new size of the receive description ring. c Make the script executable by running the following command: chmod +x set_ring_size 6 Broadcom NetXtreme and NetXtreme II TOE