bce(4) on the Dell PE 2950

[Peter Wemm]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Sean Bruno <seanwbruno at gmail.com> wrote:
> A note from clusteradm at freebsd.org
>
> It looks like there is some amount of instability or bugginess in some
> of the Broadcom firmware(management) on the bce(4) chipeset shipped on
> later generations of the Poweredge 2950 from Dell:
>
> bce0: <Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 1000Base-T (B2)>
>
> Specifically, we've seen that newer (9 and higher) have issues with the
> doing initial setup and negotiation and that Dell did indeed release
> newer firmware to fix the issues.  This requires a full reboot into
> Linux (probably centos6) to get the update to execute.
>
> Sean

More specifically.. this is the problematic revision:

bce0: ASIC (0x57081020); Rev (B2); Bus (PCI-X, 64-bit, 133MHz); B/C
(2.9.1); Bufs (RX:2;TX:2;PG:8); Flags (SPLT|MSI|MFW); MFW (NOT
RUNNING!)

and the upgrade takes you to

bce0: ASIC (0x57081020); Rev (B2); Bus (PCI-X, 64-bit, 133MHz); B/C
(5.0.4); Bufs (RX:2;TX:2;PG:8); Flags (SPLT|MSI|MFW); MFW (ipms 1.6.0)

If you're seeing things like:
bce0: ../../../dev/bce/if_bce.c(7906): Watchdog timeout occurred, resetting!
over and over, then this would be a good thing to update.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV