em device hangs on ifconfig alias ...

[Atanas]

User Freebsd said the following on 6/30/06 1:48 PM:
> 
> see 'arping' ... great little tool, solved all my problems as far as 
> moving around IPs ...
> 
Thanks for the tip, I will try it next time.

>> I still have many 4.x based machines, and both em issues (the card 
>> reset on each alias and the arp packets not been sent when going down) 
>> were present when I was doing my tests.
> 
> Right, what version of 4.x?  The one that I have working is from ~Feb 
> 2005 .. if I were to upgrade that to the latest 4-STABLE, it would break 
> like the rest ... the older 4.x had a different em driver in the kernel 
> then the newer one ...
> 
The problem was initially discovered back in 2003 (must have been with 
4.8 or 4.9) and after switching back to fxp I haven't tested the 4.x 
branch any more.

I remember testing 5.x around the 5.3 release (2004) and 6.x shortly 
after 6.0 (2005), and both em driver versions shipped with these 
releases were having the same issues.

I haven't tested it this year yet, but even in case it's fixed, it's not 
likely that all improvements will get back-ported to the older branches 
(over 90% of my servers run something older than 6.x). But as long as 
fxp works, this is a non-issue for me.

Regards,
Atanas