Hadoop and bnx2
Awhile back, I setup a hadoop cluster here at the office using some discarded old boards. They're actually a decent platform to use as Hadoop nodes as I came to find out; however, I kept having random nodes die every so often with the following kernel message:
bnx2: Chip not in correct endian mode
The solution?
...disable the IRQ balancer daemon.
It turns out that when the IRQ balancer reallocates the device's interrupt to another CPU's local APIC, it must first disable it before moving it to the new APIC ID. However, if the device had reset itself during that time, you'll end up with this endian mode problem. Running the IRQ balancer on a TaskTracker node after they've been balanced once doesn't really have a benefit anyway since you're likely scaling to the entire machine's size.