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HP DL145 G3 ethernet interrupt sharing

 
Benny Lyne Amorsen
Occasional Advisor

HP DL145 G3 ethernet interrupt sharing

We have a DL145 G3 with 2 dual-core Opterons and two NC364T quad-ethernet.

The interrupts are unfortunately shared:

32: 145724432 3 1771329 9121 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth6, eth7, eth8, eth9
35: 0 439014411 115 30272 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth2, eth3, eth4, eth5
36: 0 16 152 722287939 IO-APIC-fasteoi eth0, eth1

The largest problem is that eth0 and eth1 share interrupts, since they are busiest. This means that the 4th core gets severely overloaded, while the 3rd core is almost completely idle. I was hoping to reduce the overload by switching to quad-core CPU's, but as it is, that would just lead to 5 idle cores instead of 1.

Is there a HP DL server which can provide unique interrupts to at least the two built-in ethernets and each of the ports on a quad-ethernet card? Would a different NIC solve the problem? Do I need to pass any options to the Linux kernel (hopefully not, interrupt routing seems to be deep magic these days.)