[Xen-devel] pcnet bringing down network...

[Ben Guthro <bguthro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In testing, I am seeing a peculiar behavior when using the pcnet vif
model.

Occasionally when transferring files over the network (I have been using
wget) I see my HVM guest's network go down. ifdown/ifup seems to
temporarily fix the problem. Dom-0's network remains stable, but the
Guest's grinds to a halt. TCP streams seem to fail entirely, and ping's
seem to take many seconds instead of milliseconds.

I can get this to happen with the first wget by transferring a large
file. (64MB) This almost always fails the network, but not always in the
same place. I use Knoppix to test this, and send the wget output
to /dev/null

The following will fail the network:
wget --tries=2 --timeout=2 http://<local machine>/64Mfile.dat
-O /dev/null

This behavior does not occur under other device models - Xen's default,
rtl8139 does not exhibit this problem, only PCNet fails.

Additionally, if I allow time between transfers results vary

for example:

This will fail:
while [ 1 ];do
wget --tries=2 --timeout=2 http://<local machine>/5Mfile.dat
-O /dev/null
done

where this will succeed: (sleep added)
while [ 1 ];do
wget --tries=2 --timeout=2 http://<local machine>/5Mfile.dat
-O /dev/null
sleep 3
done

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

The last pcnet.c change looks to be changeset 10957, done during the
update to QEMU 0.8.2 - however, I tried code both before, and after this
change, and the problem does not go away - it just seems to become less
frequent as we go backwards in changesets.

I should note that although this is a Knoppix Guest on x86_64 dom0
setup, using HVM, this behavior has been seen on other guests as well
(RHEL4, FC6)

I have been looking into where this might happen for answers:
tools/ioemu/hw/pcnet.c - specifically in the pcnet_receive
code. So far, the debug output has led to few clues.

Is this a reasonable place to be looking, or is there somewhere else
that may help glean some insight into what is going on here?


Ben Guthro



-- 
________________________________________________________________________
Ben Guthro                                         Virtual Iron Software
bguthro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                            Tower 1, Floor 2
978-849-1203                                       900 Chelmsford Street
                                                   Lowell, MA 01851
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