Dropped RX Packets in ifconfig

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1

I have a Beaglebone Black deployed at a customer site that is reporting a large number dropped RX packets in ifconfig:

Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr c8:a0:30:34:b8:09

inet addr:10.121.6.30 Bcast:10.121.6.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::caa0:30ff:fe34:b809/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:10201019 errors:0 dropped:2478997 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3304697 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:1240516851 (1.1 GiB) TX bytes:250440920 (238.8 MiB)
Interrupt:40

Are there any settings that may be adjusted on the Beaglebone that may help or is this likely a cabling/network issue at the site or a defective NIC? Would it be common for the default network settings to not be able to handle incoming packets fast enough (installed BeagleBone Debian Image 2014-04-23)? I installed ethtool, but it appears that most options are not supported in this Debian image. When I ping anything on the local network, I’m getting 5-10% dropped packets.

Thanks,
Danny

2

There's been a few tweaks to the cspw driver since 2014-04-23..

Grab the latest via:

wget http://rcn-ee.com/repos/debian/pool/main/l/linux-upstream/linux-image-3.8.13-bone71_1wheezy_armhf.deb

sudo dpkg -i linux-image-3.8.13-bone71_1wheezy_armhf.deb

#backup:
sudo mv /boot/uboot/zImage /boot/uboot/zImage_old
sudo mv /boot/uboot/dtbs/ /boot/uboot/dtbs_old/

#install kernel/dtbs:
sudo cp -v /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.13-bone71 /boot/uboot/zImage
sudo mkdir -p /boot/uboot/dtbs/
sudo cp -v /boot/dtbs/3.8.13-bone71/*.dtb /boot/uboot/dtbs/

Regards,

3

HI Danny,

Not saying that it couldn’t be a driver issue, but I’ve been loading my rootfs over out network for a long time( read: close to two years, with various kernels ), and have never even seem one dropped packet, let alone 5-10%. I’ve also done some minimal testing of network mounted file systems, e.g. using dd to write / read from a remote mount. Using both iSCSI, and NFS, while observing no dropped packets. The interface was also maxed out from what I could tell ( 11MB/s + ).

So while I obviously can not give you a concrete answer, I would definitely look into cabling / internet stability. Especially if the internet used is wireless . . .

4

Danny,

Once you find the issue, would love to hear what the problem was.