ARP problem with 6.2-STABLE Intel PRO/1000 NIC, latest em driver

[Duane Whitty]

On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 11:30:07PM -0700, Mark Costlow wrote:
> The Machine:
> 
> I have a dual Xeon 5130 machine, Supermicro motherboard, with
> the 82563EB NIC.  From dmesg:
> 
> CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU            5130  @ 2.00GHz (2000.08-MHz 686-class CPU)
> cpu0: <ACPI CPU> on acpi0
> em0: <Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Connection Version - 6.2.9> port 0x2000-0x201f mem 0xda000000-0xda01ffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci4
> 
> The machine has 4G RAM and a 3ware 9000 series RAID controller with 2 drives.
> 
> pciconf -l says:
> 
> em0 at pci4:0:0:   class=0x020000 card=0x000015d9 chip=0x10968086 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
> em1 at pci4:0:1:   class=0x020000 card=0x000015d9 chip=0x10968086 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
> 
> 
> The symptom:
> 
> The machine boots OK, but can only intermittently make netork connections.
> Eventually determined that it seems to only see a few ARP packets, so
> it's falling out of other machines' ARP tables, and is often unable to
> see the replies to its own ARP requests.  It does see SOME ARPs
> though.  When it is able to communicate with another machine, it
> does not appear to drop any packets between them (e.g. I scp'd a 500M file
> at 300Mbps to this machine).
> 
> When I run "tcpdump -n arp" I see a few ARPs, but not many.  In a 1-minute
> period, I saw 3 ARP who-has/reply packets.  On a different machine on
> the same ethernet switch, I saw 225 who-has/reply packets in the same
> 1-minute period.
> 
> I've tried different cables, and a different switch.  I started with
> 6.2-RELEASE, and then went to 6.2-STABLE on 3/3/07 to get the latest
> em driver fixes.  I've used SMP and GENERIC kernels.  I get the same
> results in all cases.
> 
> There are no firewall rules installed.
> 
> I plugged in a USB ethernet adapter (realtek), and it works straight away.
> "tcpdump -n arp" sees the same noise as other machines on that LAN.
> 

Sounds like it could be bad hardware.  Can you swap nics?

> I read through the recent threads on the em driver, but didn't see any
> reported symptoms like this.  Has anyone seen anything like this?  Got
> any hints for me?  Am I doing something stupid?  Did I leave out any
> useful information about my configuration?
> 

Maybe more of your dmesg might help as it could show interrrupt issues
that perhaps others could help diagnose

--Duane

> Thanks,
> 
> Mark
> -- 
> Mark Costlow    | Southwest Cyberport | Fax:   +1-505-232-7975
> cheeks at swcp.com | Web:   www.swcp.com | Voice: +1-505-232-7992
> 
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