FreeBSD 8.0 - network stack crashes?

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Tom Judge wrote:
> Tom Judge wrote:
>> Weldon S Godfrey 3 wrote:
>>> we are using onboard NICs on the Dell using the bce driver.  We did try 
>>> several times to see if using an intel PCIexpress card using the em 
>>> driver, and we had the same symptoms.
>>> 
>>> Could the bce driver have the same leak?
>> 
>> The bce driver does not have a memory leak, it does however have a bug 
>> which causes memory fragmentation leading to denied mbuf allocation.
>> 
>> There is a work around for this in current, you can get the patch like 
>> this:
>> 
>> http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/head/
>> 
> That should be:
>
> svn diff -r 198319:198320 http://svn.freebsd.org/base/head
>
>> You need to put
>> 
>> options        BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT
>> 
>> In your kernel to enable the work arround.

Unless I'm missing something, these seem like they may be totally 
different bugs.  The symptoms that Weldon S Godfrey has show the number of 
"mbuf clusters in use" rising to the point at which the limit is reached, 
whereas the thread on -stable where BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT is recommended has 
the symptom of "requests for 9k jumbo clusters denied" increasing and the 
mbuf clusters not being anywhere near to the maximum.

So, I think there may be some confusion here.

Gavin