5.3-RELEASE w/ IPSEC & RACOON

[freebsd at trinetworks.com]

Good Morning!

I have a simple tunnel established between two FreeBSD machines. The
tunnel is encrypted using IPSEC and Racoon. Prior to 5.3-*, I have never
experienced any issues with it.

Using the same configuration in 5.3-*, the tunnel is still established and
simple traffic can be sent across the tunnel. When a sudden burst of
packets is sent through the tunnel, that particular connection completly
and permanantly freezes. An example of this is a simple SSH session to
another FreeBSD machine where a dmesg is issued. About 5 lines into the
dmesg, the connection freezes up.

I have read a lot about the MPSAFE/GIANT situation in 5.3-*, and noticed
that my kernel warned me that MPSAFE was forced to be disabled due to
IPSEC's requirement to be in a GIANT-LOCKED environment. I havn't yet
determined that this particular issue is what is causing my problems.

When racoon is disabled and IPSEC is removed from the kernel, I do not
experience this issue.

Does anyone have any ideas or information? Thanks in advance!

Matt Lager