kern/153610: nfe0 malfunction at boot time

[Ronald F.Guilmette]

>Number:         153610
>Category:       kern
>Synopsis:       nfe0 malfunction at boot time
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat Jan 01 23:10:10 UTC 2011
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Ronald F. Guilmette
>Release:        FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64
>Organization:
Infinite Monkeys & Co.
>Environment:

FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64

Gigabyte GA-m55plus-S3G nmotherboard w/ Nvidia 430 Southbridge

Onboard Ethernet port hardwired up to a stock Linksys WRT54G wireless
router configured for static (i.e. NO DHCP)

>Description:

Upon boot-up of the GA-m55plus-S3G based system, I get an (unending?)
stream of console/syslog messages exactly like this:

nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)

After googling around awhile, I learned that this is an old, and apparently
still unsolved problem:

  http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/freebsd-current/2008/1/18/578972

The thread above suggested that I try manually down-ing and then up-ing
the nfe0 interface.  I did that, and yes, that causes the problem to go
away and after that up/down the interface seems to be functioning normally.
However this server SHOULD be able to recover gracefully from, e.g.,
power failures, even when I am out of town, so what am I supposed to do?
Should I add "manual" down & up commands for this interface to my
/etc/rc.local file??

Ideally, I shouldn't have to do that (and I'm not even 100% sure that even
doing that will produce reliable results).

>How-To-Repeat:

See above.  Get yourself a motherboard with an Nvidia 430 Southbridge
on it, and then wire up the ethernet port from that to a stock Linksys
WRT54G, set the Linksys box to NO DHCP (although that probably doesn't
matter), give the nfe0 device a static IP in your /etc/rc.conf file
(although that probably doesn't matter either), and then do a cold restart.

>Fix:

Beats me.  I am forced to workaround this for now by installing a cheapie
Realtek ethernet card (which most certainly works).

That's a pity, because I wanted to try using the gigabit capability of the
onboard Nvidia ethernet port.  Oh well.  I'll live.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: