Periodic xl watchdog timeouts on 6.2-RELEASE

[Brian J. Conway]

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:13:41 -0800
"Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Brian J. Conway" <bconway at clue4all.net>
> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
> Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 3:13 AM
> Subject: Re: Periodic xl watchdog timeouts on 6.2-RELEASE
> 
> 
> > On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:22:44 -0800
> > "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I have found with some of the intel MBs that the latest BIOS update
> > > actually causes trouble.  Don't be afraid to try back-flashing to an
> > > older BIOS update.  Intel has all the BIOS versions up on their site
> > > for each board.
> > >
> > > Ted
> >
> > Tried a few things in the past couple days:
> >
> > - Set the interfaces to not auto-negotiate and hard-coded them: No
> > change. - Tried the past 3 BIOS revisions I had been using previously:
> > No change.
> >
> > Next up, started swapping around cards.  I noticed that one of my 3
> > 3c905C cards hadn't been giving the watchdog timeout errors that I
> > could remember, even though I'm doubting 2/3 of my previously-good
> > cards are actually bad, but I kept that one at xl1 and tried a good
> > 3c905B as xl0. This worked a little differently, now instead of
> > watchdog timeouts, on the previously-normal xl1 I get:
> >
> > Mar 15 05:56:51 imogen kernel: xl1: transmission error: 90
> > Mar 15 05:56:51 imogen kernel: xl1: tx underrun, increasing tx start
> > threshold to 120 bytes
> >
> > I know it's *technically* an informational message and not a problem,
> > I'm a perfectionist and would prefer it not to be there.
> 
> I didn't know you had multiple 3com cards so I didn't mention this
> earlier, but you will find the 3com cards with the WHITE label on the
> card to work better than the ones with the YELLOW label.  It's a chipset
> revision thing. It also happens under some versions of Linux.
> 
> The underrun error is perfectly fine and can be ignored.  I have gotten
> them myself with no ill effects.  You will not be able to fix this
> message.  It will go
> away once the driver has increased the buffer enough.
> 
> Ted

Interesting.  I swapped in a 4th 905C that I procurred alongside my 905B
(white label) and still get only the underrun messages on xl1, so it looks
good.  I'll keep around those first two cards that gave the watchdog
timeouts for later testing.  Thanks.

Brian J. Conway