10.3. Flow Control for e1000 Network Interface Cards

The e1000 network interface card family do not have flow control enabled in the 2.6 kernel on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5. If you have heavy traffic, then the RAC interconnects may lose blocks, see Metalink Bug:5058952. For more information on flow control, see Wikipedia Flow control.

To enable Receive flow control for e1000 network interface cards, add the following line to the /etc/modprobe.conf file:

options e1000 FlowControl=1

The e1000 module needs to be reloaded for the change to take effect. Once the module is loaded with flow control, you should see e1000 flow control module messages in /var/log/messages.