BIOS setting for ATR for mitigating packet drops on DL360p Gen8 with Intel NIC?

[Stefan Puiu]

Hi,

I'm currently working on an app that is meant to run on an HP DL360p Gen8 server and receive high rates of traffic (~4 Gbps) on one or two 10G NICs. It runs on Ubuntu 12.04 server 64 bit with the 3.11 kernel. The NICs we are using are shown by lspci as "HP Ethernet 10Gb 2-port 560SFP+ Adapter". Trouble is, I'm intermittently seeing packet drops, reported by ethtool -S as 'rx_no_dma_resources'. The drops are not very consistent - sometimes they show up, sometimes they don't depending on the run. I've set the HP Power Profile in the BIOS to "maximum performance" to no avail.

I checked the Intel ixgbe/driver forum  Sourceforge and the Intel guys are saying there's a BIOS setting that can help networking performance - "Extended ATR" or "Ageing Timer Rollover" (see below). I didn't find anything like this in the BIOS guide (I checked the "HP ROM-Based Setup Utility User Guide" from the DL360p support page). Is there an equivalent setting with a similar impact?
For the e1000 thread see here: http://sourceforge.net/p/e1000/mailman/message/31900862/

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

As far as I know, this setting is available with Intel System Boards using Intel BIOS.

This or similar to this setting is not available in HP BIOS.

I found this setting in Super Micro computer's system board "X9DR3-LN4F+ and X9DRi-LN4F+".

http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/C606_602/MNL-1258.pdf

Page# 83

Thank You!
I am a HP employee.

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[Stefan Puiu]

Hi,

Thanks for replying. Any other settings that I might tweak? I've already looked at http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA4-9294ENW , even though it's a somewhat different NIC than what we're using.