em device hangs on ifconfig alias ...

[User Freebsd]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Michael Vince wrote:

> I thought I remember a developer working on the em driver saying just 
> before 6.1 was released that this reset was needed and couldn't be 
> avoided to ensure performance of the device to work at its best, I can't 
> remember his explanation, but this topic has come up before, of course 
> anything is possible to fix.

The thing is, and I may be mis-understanding the explanations so far, the 
'reset' is to renegotiate the connection ... if that is the case, and both 
the switch and the interface are already locked at a speed (in my case, 
both are hard coded to "100baseTX full duplex", then what is there to 
re-negotiate?

And, why does it appear that *only* the em driver/interface requires this? 
I run bge and fxp interfaces on this same network, against the same 
switch, all locked at the same speed, and only the em driver exhibits this 
problem ... in fact, its only the *newer* em driver that does, as I have 
one server on the network, using an em interface, that is running an older 
FreeBSD 4.x kernel, that performs the same as the bge/fxp (ie. perfectly)

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