5.3-Stable network issue

[Martin Minkus]

On 10/2/2005 23:55, "Freddie Cash" <fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca> wrote:

>> I seem to have been having a rather strange networking issue in
>> FreeBSD 5.3-Stable (it started happening immediately after 5.2.1 and
>> has persisted since.. I keep ³hoping² that next time I cvsup it will
>> be fixed, but no).
> 
>> I downgraded back to 5.2.1-p13 and it is perfectly fine once again.
> 
>> *** Some background information:
> 
>> My FreeBSD box is my home NAT router, server, firewall, etc. It does
>> DHCP, MX for some of my domains, secondary DNS (I got primary
>> elsewhere), apache for some webhosting, blah blah blah. Nothing
>> really special. It is a Dual PIII-500, 512mb ram, and a couple ATA
>> hdd¹s. Had 3 realtek network interfaces, but down to 2 now.
> 
> Any chance of using non-RealTek cards?  They are notorious for
> performing poorly at the best of times.
> 
> My laptop has one of these internally, and every now and then it'll
> drop the connection.  Usually with an error about an oversize frame
> being discarded.  An "ifconfig down" "ifconfig up" will fix the issue.
> 
> Enabling polling support (either via the kernel config option
> DEVICE_POLLING or the sysctl) helps some.
> 
> The best solution, though, is to get better NICs.
> 
> For run, read the man page for rl(4) and the comments in the rl
> source.  Quite enlightening about the "issues" the RealTek chipsets
> have.  :)

Yeah, I've thought about it. But I got no non realtek cards on me, so I'd
have to buy them. And there's always a chance this has nothing to do with
network cards or the driver (after all, it has worked flawlessly for me
since the FreeBSD 3.x days).

I am wondering if it is related to my motherboard, or something else? I have
a Epox dual cpu board... K something, I'd have to dig it up. Perhaps there
is some issue with that, causing the kernel to do funny things?

What will enabling polling support do?

Martin.