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r80.40 - VSX interface affinity HP DL380G10 Openserver tg3
Hello,
I am new in Checkpoint firewalls (well I configured a couple of rules 20 years ago in Solaris based one, but this does not count) and I have inherited a VSX HA cluster running on HP DL380 Gen10 Openserver with 3 quad tg3 based (broadcom) 1G NICs and a couple of dual Intel 10G NICs. The box has 2x10 cores, the first 8 of them are licensed.
I have read a lot of documents and skXXXXX in the last days, many forum posts and have done several experiments. I still have some issues with setting up the affinity of the interfaces properly.
Long story short, it looks like each tg3 interface is serviced by 5 IRQs
So, my question is... does it look the same in other installations using tg3 driver in r80.40 / is it expected behaviour or should I look for something else?
sk166356 looks similar but a bit different case. Now that I look closer, I believe I can emulate the way that fw ctl affinity matches the interfaces to interrupts (maybe it is the "last resort" method):
@jkougoulos one more thing to observe.... disable your unlicensed cores in the BIOS of your open server hardware. There are some known strange problems if more cores active then licensed.
@Wolfgangthanks for this hint. I saw somewhere that tg3 may enable more channels depending on number of cores, but if I want to reduce the cores to 8 in Bios, probably this would mean to switch to 2x4 cores - moving the load between the 2 processors which might have some performance impact.
I will start with ethtool tuning first and if it plays any role and see if I need to resort to reducing the number of cores. I guess I could also set the affinity manually using commands to /proc/irq/xxx/smp_affinity