Dell PowerEdge 2970 - Manual (Page 8)

6
Broadcom NetXtreme and NetXtreme II TOE
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 eth
n 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 eth
n 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