if_sk : the weirdest thing!

[Loren M. Lang]

On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 12:59:34AM +0100, craig wrote:
> my machine has a hdd swap-rack which allows me to boot different os's 
> off different physical drives. (ie. pull-out xp, and plug in fbsd).
> i recently purchased another hdd+tray to install gentoo on, just to see 
> what the fuss is about.
> 
> i booted off the 2004.3 minimal install cd but it did not, 
> unfortuanately, automatically find my realtek gigabit nic.
> i suspected it might not, because i had a hell of time getting it to 
> work on fbsd aswell - requiring a patched if_sk driver to get it going.
> 
> after a bit of digging, i found that i could
> 
> # modprobe sk98lin
> 
> to get the kernel happy with the nic. once up, it worked like a charm.
> it got late and i needed to finish up some work on fbsd, so i pulled the 
> gentoo drive out, plugged fbsd back in and booted up.
> 
> when it came up, i found that i was without a network!
> # dmesg | grep sk
>    said something about (IIRC)
> (blah)
> skc0: no PHY found
> 
> # ifconfig
>    confirmed that there was no net
> 
> when i tried to manually
> # kldload if_sk
> freebsd panic'ed and died right there!
> 
> i rebooted a few times (a trick i learnt from ms) but still it would not 
> come back. even powering the machine completely down did not help!!!
> so i plugged in the winxp drive and booted. it came up fine, network in 
> good working order.
> i booted fbsd again and the network came up this time without a complaint!

I'm assuming that your referring to a warm reboot AKA you never turned
the machine off.  Not all hardware is fully reset on a warm reboot.
It's possible the linux driver is leaving the hardware in a different
state when you reboot that the freebsd driver doesn't check for.  The
windows driver probably does since the manufacture wrote that driver,
not some random person trying to reverse engineer it.  Not to say they
didn't do a good job, but just that little details are harder to catch
sometime.  I bet if you fully shut the system down that freebsd will
work fine without rebooting.

Is there any way of doing a dump of all the PCI registers so one of the
developers might be able to find what's different?  pciconf might be
able to.

> 
> AND I CAN REPLICATE THIS MADNESS!
> 
> boot fbsd
>  - check network = all okay
> boot gentoo livecd
>  - load sk98lin
>  - check network = all okay
> boot fbsd
>  - check network = notwork!
> 
> (remedy)
> boot wxp
>  - check network = all okay
> boot fbsd
>  - check network = all okay
> 
> 
> wtf???
> 
> i understand that my GF would be upset if i played around with other 
> girls, but does my OS have to be *so damn jealous*????
> 
> any ideas whats on here?
> 
> -- 
> craig at small-pla.net
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-- 
I sense much NT in you.
NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
Powerful Unix is.

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