Summary about nve network interface driver

[Kövesdán Gábor]

Hi,

I've experineced serious errors with the nve driver and I've seen quite 
many people would like to use it, but they also experiences these error. 
There are open PR's and unfortunately nobody has volunteered to fix this 
issue, the PR's have the default Responsible field, nobody has changed 
it. Maxime Henrion has tried to fix the crashes, however, and asked me 
to test his commits in HEAD, but unfortunately things haven't become 
better. I've also seen, that Quinton Dolan, the original developer of 
this driver, has also committed something to HEAD, he was the last 
committer to that file when I checked HEAD, but unfortunately at moment 
RELENG_6 has this buggy version and so has HEAD. I've checked both. The 
problem is complicated, the experineced errors are quite different:

-    Sometimes it crashes with an attempted use of a free mbuf. See: 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=83943
I've experineced and reported this issue in RELENG_6.
There is an another report by Dmitry Selin: 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=amd64/82555

-   I've also exprienced a general protection fault and I suspect it 
must be related to the nve driver.
See: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=84133
I've experineced this issue in RELENG_6 and in HEAD.

- Some people have device timeouts with nve. See: 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=amd64/84027
I've also experienced it, but haven't reported, I wanted to get the 
crashes fixed first.


I'm very interested in fixing this driver, because I would like to use 
FreeBSD 6.0 as my desktop os, but unfortunately I don't have the 
knowledge to fix this driver. If somebody would volunteer to take care, 
I'd do the testing in RELENG_6 or HEAD or I'd do what I'd been told to 
do. It would be really nice if it got fixed by the time 6.0-RELEASE gets 
released.

Cheers,

Gábor Kövesdán