Intel Pro/1000 82540 Ethernet, was RE: SuperMicro X5DEI-GG

[Marc Olzheim]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 04:59:39PM -0500, Guy Helmer wrote:
> > dual-Xeon motherboard?  It seems to work OK on a uniprocessor kernel, but
> > FreeBSD 4.8 SMP kernels lock up after the "mounting root" message or after
> > ifconfiging lo0 in the startup scripts.  Our first machine may just be
> > flaky, so I'll try another one as soon as possible...
> 
> I seem to have isolated the problems with SMP on this machine to the
> built-in Intel Pro/1000 (82540) Ethernet interfaces.  The machine *nearly*
> freezes after ifconfig is run during startup.  It can respond to the
> keyboard
> (accepting characters) the first few times I unplug/plug the Ethernet cable
> from em0 and cause link down/up messages on the console.  This only works a
> few
> times before the keyboard becomes completely unresponsive.  I've tried a
> 4.8-RELEASE
> and a 4.9-STABLE kernel cvsuped today.  Any suggestions would be
> appreciated.

I've just had about the same problems and sent the machine back to the
supplier, who contacted SuperMicro. Our machine had an Adaptec 39320 in
it's PCI slot, in addition to the one on the motherboard. It seemed that
the Adaptec in the PCI slot conflicted with the onboard network
adapters.

A Linux kernel (2.4.20 I believe) told me I indeed had a PCI conflict.
FreeBSD 4.8 and 5.0 (both Current and RELEASE) didn't mention anything,
but showed flaky network performance.

The supplier exchanged the Adaptec 39230 with a half height PCI card
(different PCI bus) and are running tests on the machine now.

Zlo