[Avila] Too many ethernet interrupts on Gateworks board

[David Acker]

Jay Lee wrote:
> I have GW2348-4 boards and using gateworks development kit to compile 
> kernel. I'm experiencing exactly same problem of 2000-4000 interrupts 
> per second. I've used kernel 2.4 and kernel 2.6 but the result was same. 
> I've also updated madwifi driver to latest and tried on both 2.4 and 2.6 
> kernels but still had the same problem.
> 
> I gave up the development software from gateworks and used snapgear 
> 3.4.0 with Intel CSR 2.0. With this, I still noticed high interrupts 
> however cpu utilisation was 0. I'm not sure if it has resolved the 
> problem or cpu utilisation is being measured correctly. Moreover the 
> default snapgear did not detect the onboard flash properly.
> 
> Can anyone suggest me easy ways to solve this high cpu util / high 
> interrupts problem. Is there any snapgear patch to detect the onboard 
> flash?
> 

The problem is the intel ethernet driver.  It does some kind of periodic 
  interrupt that occurs every often that the driver uses to trigger some 
kind of polling.  I got rid of that driver and went with a real open 
source driver, http://www.hohnstaedt.de/ixp_npe/ .  I am running 0.2.1 
with 2.6.18.4, although 0.3.1 went through a review on the ARM list not 
too long ago.  I believe that this driver will go into the mainline in 
the near future.  There may be a way to configure the intel driver to 
fix this but I have not tried it.  Personally, I find the hohnstaedt 
driver much easier to follow.
-Ack