This document summarizes the Ether Channel Hardening test effort of the IBM Linux Technology Center Test Team. It will further describe the test approach, unresolved issues, environment, test cases, and observations IBM Austin TX. It will also identify areas where additional testing is needed.
The test was be conducted in different phases. First phase of testing was done with the systems connected back to back using twisted pair cables. In the second phase the systems were connected and the tests were executed for a longer duration. The Intel gigabit Ethernet driver can handle up to 8 cards. This capability of the driver was also stressed. All the stress tests under LTP was run along with the ether-channel hardening tests. The log files in /var/log directory was examined to see if any error or warning messages were logged either by the fiber optic card driver or the kernel.
I was unable to bond the NIC's due to driver problems. Defects were raised in bugzilla the links are as below.
The Ethernet cards can be bonded together in various modes, they can be bonded to in active backup mode, XOR mode etc depending on the desired intend. This test will require additional hardware - Giga bit fiber optic switch.
This section details the distributions, and kernel versions, and defines the hardware configurations used during testing.
Initial test efforts focused on commercially available distributions. The LTC is continually evaluating its' test environment and may add additional distributions in the future. The distributions and releases for the test effort were as follows:
The official Linus Kernels were used, available at www.kernel.org.
Test requires 12 Gigabit fiber optic Ethernet cards, fiber optic cables, 2 enterprise level machines.
| Name | Processor | Memory | Storage | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SMP I | Intel Pentium III (8-way) | 12GB | 18GB | |
| SMP II | Intel Pentium III (8-way) | 12GB | 18GB | |
| SMP III | Intel Pentium III (8-way) | 12GB | 18GB |
The tests were all executed successfully per the test plan.
| Location: | Manual test. |
| Description: | Six fiber optic Gigabit cards are connected back to back to six other fiber optic Gigabit cards, NetPipe is executed on each one of them for 24 hours with different buffer sizes. |
| Target Test Duration: | 24 hours |
| Average Test Duration: | 24 hours |
| Hardware: | cobra.ltc.Austin.ibm.com and ozzy.ltc.Austin.ibm.com |
| Kernel: | 2.4.x |
| Distributions: | SuSE 7.2 |
| Observations: | Test executed for 24 hours, no messages or warnings were recorded. |
| Location: | Manual test. |
| Description: | Six fiber optic Gigabit cards are connected back to back to six other fiber optic Gigabit cards, NetPipe is executed on each one of them for 96 hours with different buffer sizes. |
| Target Test Duration: | 96 hours |
| Average Test Duration: | 96 hours |
| Hardware: | cobra.ltc.Austin.ibm.com and ozzy.ltc.Austin.ibm.com |
| Kernel: | 2.4.x |
| Distributions: | SuSE 7.2 |
| Observations: | Test executed for 96 hours, no messages or warnings were recorded. |
| Location: | Manual test. |
| Description: | Six fiber optic Gigabit cards are connected back to back to six other fiber optic Gigabit cards, NetPipe is executed on each one of them for 96 hours with different buffer sizes. The system was operating under heavy stress, the LTP test-suite including the networking tests were executed along with the NetPipe tests. |
| Target Test Duration: | 96 hours |
| Average Test Duration: | 96 hours |
| Hardware: | cobra.ltc.Austin.ibm.com and ozzy.ltc.Austin.ibm.com |
| Kernel: | 2.4.x |
| Distributions: | SuSE 7.3 |
| Observations: | Test executed for 96 hours, no messages or warnings were recorded. |
| Last modified on: August 02, 2006 - 10:13:16 PDT. |