Marvel Yukon using the sk driver

[Clayton Milos]

> Hi, what I can tell.
> I had a terrible problem with this card (PCI-E version) exactly one week 
> ago. Both drivers msk from the system and myk from the vendor show similar 
> behavior.
> On high loads, like 2-3 users from Samba domain pulling their profiles at 
> the same time, the card just chokes. No ping, and
> "buffer overflow message".
> I mean I had to bring the interface down and up again. Absolutely 
> disgusting.
> No tweak helps.
>
> I mean, we tested it over the weekend and it was fine, till folks come 
> there on Monday and start massively using the server.
>
> We downgraded the hardware and put good old 3Com509 PCI or whatever works 
> with xl driver.
>
>
> Robert Slawson said the following on 20.08.2007 10:13:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I have a marvel yukon pci gigabit ethernet card. For some reason, after a 
>> period of time it will not transmit unless I make it transmit by pinging 
>> via the console. It is very annoying as I cannot ssh into the machine 
>> until I "wake up" the card by telling it to ping something.
>>
>> I am using 6.2 stable and just yesterday rebuilt the kernel and world 
>> hoping this would fix the problem. But nothing seems to help.
>>
>> I think the card needs to use the msk driver , which is installed, but 
>> the card keeps using the sk driver. Is there a way to have freebsd re 
>> identify the card correctly and use the proper driver?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Bob

>From my experience it always pays to use good hardware. I use 3com/Broadcom 
or Intel NIC's. Nothing else. Ever!
They get much better throughput with less CPU overhead. And the real 
advantage is they have good suport in UNIX systems.
I know Jack Vogel did his best and sorted out the issues with mine and many 
other people's Intel gigabit (em based) cards when there were issues. My em 
card is flying along happily now like it should be.
The last server I bought had dual onboard Broadcom NIC's and I've had not 
issues throwing 500Mbit/s through them. Haven't had a chance to really push 
them to the limits yet.

I know I'm not really helping you directly here but my advice would be to 
throw an Intel gigabit desktop adapter in there and your problems will 
disappear. They're only $20-$30 nowadays and it's going to take your 
headache away.

-Clay