[Soekris] Soekris net6501-70: CPU Speed / Network throughput slow?

[Hermann Himmelbauer]

Am 09.11.2011 17:08, schrieb Kyle Brantley:
> On 11/9/2011 8:10 AM, Lonnie Abelbeck wrote:
>> Hi Hermann,
>>
>> I am getting better results than you are.
>>
>> I have a the 1MB/1GHz net6501-50, comBIOS 1.40h, and using it as a router...
>>
>> [ iperf -s ] --- [eth0/WAN # net6501-50 # eth2/LAN] --- [ iperf -c ... ]
>>
>> I get 515 Mbits/sec with the default iperf settings.  'top' is non-responsive during the test on the console.
>>
>> I'm using linux kernel 2.6.35 with the latest e1000e driver from sourceforge, no-SMP and iptables (IPv4 NAT/IPv6) firewall active.
>> --
>
> A quick test against a device on the same switch as my 6501-70, ran for 
> two minutes:
> 
> [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
> [  3]  0.0-120.0 sec  11.1 GBytes   797 Mbits/sec
> 
> Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.38.6-26.rc1.fc15.x86_64 #1 SMP Mon May 9 
> 20:45:15 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> Not quite full wire speed, but acceptable. It also consumed the 'entire' 
> CPU (as per top, 100% dedicated to software interrupts), leaving the HT 
> core mostly available.

Thanks a lot for your reply. It seems that there's something wrong with
my setup, maybe it's the kernel? What bios version do you have? Do you
have HT enabled?

I would be very much interested in comparing the CPU speed, can you
perhaps download the following and run "nbench" (already precompiled for
the 6501)?

http://violin.qwer.tk/~dusty/temp/nbench.tgz

My results are as follows:

----------------- snip ---------------------
BYTEmark* Native Mode Benchmark ver. 2 (10/95)
Index-split by Andrew D. Balsa (11/97)
Linux/Unix* port by Uwe F. Mayer (12/96,11/97)

TEST                : Iterations/sec.  : Old Index   : New Index
                    :                  : Pentium 90* : AMD K6/233*
--------------------:------------------:-------------:------------
NUMERIC SORT        :          174.02  :       4.46  :       1.47
STRING SORT         :          23.077  :      10.31  :       1.60
BITFIELD            :      6.8908e+07  :      11.82  :       2.47
FP EMULATION        :          23.429  :      11.24  :       2.59
FOURIER             :          2255.1  :       2.56  :       1.44
ASSIGNMENT          :          3.3704  :      12.82  :       3.33
IDEA                :          646.05  :       9.88  :       2.93
HUFFMAN             :          284.09  :       7.88  :       2.52
NEURAL NET          :          2.1586  :       3.47  :       1.46
LU DECOMPOSITION    :          120.12  :       6.22  :       4.49
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK
RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX       : 9.319
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 3.811
Baseline (MSDOS*)   : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA
BELOW===============================
CPU                 : GenuineIntel Genuine Intel(R) CPU        @ 1.60GHz
1600MHz
L2 Cache            : 512 KB
OS                  : Linux 2.6.32-5-686
C compiler          : gcc version 4.4.5 (Debian 4.4.5-8)
libc                : libc-2.11.2.so
MEMORY INDEX        : 2.358
INTEGER INDEX       : 2.302
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.114
Baseline (LINUX)    : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
----------------- snip ---------------------

My /proc/interrupts look a bit different:

-----------------snip ----------------------
            CPU0
   0:         65    XT-PIC-XT        timer
   2:          0    XT-PIC-XT        cascade
   4:        621    XT-PIC-XT        serial
   7:         13    XT-PIC-XT
   8:          0    XT-PIC-XT        rtc0
   9:          6    XT-PIC-XT        ehci_hcd:usb1, ohci_hcd:usb3,
ohci_hcd:usb4, ohci_hcd:usb5, serial
  10:          0    XT-PIC-XT        ehci_hcd:usb2, ohci_hcd:usb6,
ohci_hcd:usb7, ohci_hcd:usb8
  22:       7585   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0-rx-0
  23:          0   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0-tx-0
  24:          2   PCI-MSI-edge      eth0
  25:      21734   PCI-MSI-edge      ahci
  26:     190244   PCI-MSI-edge      eth1-rx-0
  27:     121159   PCI-MSI-edge      eth1-tx-0
  28:          4   PCI-MSI-edge      eth1
 NMI:    2508751   Non-maskable interrupts
 LOC:    3794295   Local timer interrupts
 SPU:          0   Spurious interrupts
 PMI:    2508751   Performance monitoring interrupts
 PND:    2507386   Performance pending work
 RES:          0   Rescheduling interrupts
 CAL:          0   Function call interrupts
 TLB:          0   TLB shootdowns
 TRM:          0   Thermal event interrupts
 THR:          0   Threshold APIC interrupts
 MCE:          0   Machine check exceptions
 MCP:         52   Machine check polls
 ERR:         13
 MIS:          0
-----------------snip ----------------------

I wonder why I have so much NMI, PMI and PND interrupts?

Many thanks for help!

Best Regards,
Hermann