Panics and freeze using age0

Pyun YongHyeon pyunyh at gmail.com
Thu Nov 6 23:24:07 PST 2008


On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 10:45:09AM -0800, Gabriele Cecchetti wrote:
 > I'm running FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE over Asus P5Q motherboard.
 > Such board comes with an nic requiring age0 driver.
 > When the nic is under load, such trasferring big amount of data
 > over gigabit connection (let's say some gigabyte backups),
 > the computer hangs, sometimes with panic, sometimes freezing.
 > 

Without backtrace is really hard to guess what's the cause of
panic. So please send backtrace to us.

 > Before that i was using an Intel nic with em0 driver
 > and 7.0-Stable#2.. and that configuration was really stable.
 > 
 > Looking at the backtrace we found that the page fault happened
 > during pmap operations (sorry I've not the backtrace anymore to attach 
 > to this mail).
 > Another problem with age0 driver was that when the machine boot, the nic
 > goes up and down and then remain down. Everytime, gaining control of it 
 > was a mess.
 > 

Would you be more elaborate on this issue? Does it mean you have
to manually up/down game with ifconfig(8) after boot?

 > Anyone with similar experience ?
 > age0 driver is well tested for production enviroment or not ?

7.1-RELEASE would be the first official release that will ship
age(4). So I don't think it was well tested under various
workloads. But if you can provide more information for the issue
I think it could be enhanced in near future.

 > Is better to buy another Intel card and going on using em0 driver ?

Remember, all hardwares supported by age(4) are for consumer
motherboards. Even if L1 has much better performance/design than
that of its successor, L1E, it's still not for server market.
The same is true for em(4). Since there are too many variants you
may have to choose the best hardware model that is suited for your
workload.

 > Any other problems affecting this release just now ?
 > 
 > And, last question, 7.1-PRERELEASE should belong to the STABLE tree ?
 > In that case why during the last two months is so instable for 
 > production enviroment ?
 > 
 > Maybe I'm wrong, so I accept suggestions.
-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon


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