E4500 with 24GB RAM

Kris Kennaway kris at obsecurity.org
Sat Jun 11 07:36:43 GMT 2005


On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 04:26:32PM +0900, Pyun YongHyeon wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 03:40:28PM +0900, Hiroki Sato wrote:
>  > Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote
>  >   in <20050610211239.GA59402 at xor.obsecurity.org>:
>  > 
>  > kr> I wonder if it's disk related.  I tried to check out a ports tree on
>  > kr> this machine and it hung in a few seconds (although this was also
>  > kr> checking out using the network via nfs).
>  > 
>  >  I do not know why but the freeze occurs only when displaying "invalid
>  >  packet size xxx; dropping".  When I tried "vmstat 1" on the serial
>  >  console and fetching a large file via ftp at the same time
>  >  with 12GB RAM configuration, the freeze did not occur.
>  >  Once "hme0: too may errors; not reporting any more" is displayed,
>  >  the box seems to work fine and I can check out the ports tree via NFS
>  >  without problems.
>  > 
> 
> Normally the "invalid packet size" message comes from link mismatch.
> If your HME's PHY is DP83840 there are known issues on link neogotiation.
> AFAIK the issue has nothing to do with panic as I always see that on my
> Ultra2 which has DP83840 PHY too.

This is on e450 and e4500 machines.  I don't think there's a link
mismatch.

> I wonder how you can use NFS reliably on sparc64. Due to failure of
> alignment(both server and client) it's really easy to get panic on sparc64.

AFAICR I've never seen a problem with this (except with an i386 4.x
server, which can be panicked by a sparc64 client)..I don't rely on
NFS heavily in most cases, but I do use it on a number of machines
(including two package build machines that netboot and access their
ports trees over NFS, and have been in continuous operation with an
uptime of 110 days).

>  >  I tried to comment out the HME_WHINE line of hme_read() in if_hme.c,
>  >  and it seems to make the box work fine so far.
> 
> HME_WHINE() just prints a message. I can't think removing the function
> can cure your problem.

It does seem to have helped though..before it would reliably lock up
in seconds, and DDB break was non-responsive.

Kris
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