Regression: em driver in -CURRENT, "Invalid MAC address"

[Jack Vogel]

I'm willing to bet that its in fact the same problem that VMWare is having.
Our method of getting the mac address changed, and the emulations seem
to be unprepared for it.

This was done for a real customer requirement to allow support of alternate
mac addressing in firmware. What happens now is a warm reset of the hardware
is done, followed by reading the RAR[0] register. In a real Intel NIC the
mac
address will be valid in that register, but in VMWare, and I'm willing to
bet in
VirtualBox as well, its 0.

VMWare also has 3 choices of device (wow, amazing coincidence :), can
you tell me when you pick e1000 what real adapter it claims to emulate?

I am considering options for this problem. The one I lean toward right now
is to make a "legacy" em driver, it will have support for ONLY pre-PCI
Express
hardware, it will be frozen as it were, the idea is that with no new work on
it
it will not suffer from any regression type failures. If I do this, there
are some
strategy issues, and its those I'm thinking about.

In any case, I intend to have this problem resolved for 8's release. Stay
tuned.

Jack


On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 5:25 AM, Ivan Voras <ivoras at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> When I upgraded my 7-STABLE virtual machine under VirtualBox to 8-CURRENT,
> the em driver stopped working. VirtualBox supports three different flavours
> of emulated em devices, all of which result in the "Invalid MAC address"
> error and cannot be used any more.
>
> The error was previously reported for VMWare, but since VirtualBox is as
> different from VMWare as it can be, the problem is most likely in the
> driver.
>
> I can provide more information if needed, I'll be at DevSummit with the
> box.
>
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