recent stability problems with fxp driver

[Mike Tancsa]

At 12:26 PM 12/09/2003, Info Account wrote:
>I've spent the past four days or so updating machines here to 4.8/9-stable via
>cvsup, and have done a complete make buildworld/kernel on each machine (some
>SMP, some single processor).  It seems something is broken with the latest fxp
>driver, on each machine (different mobos and hardware configs) heavy network
>traffic with fxp NICs causes timeouts and random kernel panics.

I have a few boxes pushing over 50Mb with fxp cards and havent seen this 
problem.  What type of fxp cards do you have ?  What does
  pciconf -v -l
show for the Intel types ?

Also, I have found in the past that I would see this behavior if I changed 
NICs and didnt do a PCIconfig reset in the MB BIOS.  There is something 
about Intel nics and Adaptec and 3ware cards that particularly require 
this.  Also, make sure that you dont have some duplex mismatches on the 
nics.  I have seen where excessive errors combined with high traffic will 
cause panics.

Also, please post the actual error messages on each of the machines.

         ---Mike




>First machine to experience the problem was a single proc PIII-650 with 
>512M and
>Adaptec 2940UW, one fxp, doing a backup via scp, after 10 megs or so starting
>giving fxp0 timeout errors and dropping the connection (host was not pingable
>and dropped all arp entries).  The only way to restart the scp was to ifconfig
>fxp0 back up with the same IP and netmask.
>
>Second machine is a dual proc PIII-650 with 512M, MegaRAID, one fxp - after a
>minute or so of scp'ing the machine completely locked, had to be hard reset.
>Second attempt caused a panic that seized entire machine with instant reboot.
>
>Few more machines, same problems, all with varying SCSI subsystems and 
>with one
>fxp NIC.  After replacing each machine's fxp with crappy tulip and/or $12 
>kmart
>linksys NIC, I've had no problems at all.
>
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