Broadcom watchdog timeout with 7.4-PRERELEASE

[Michael L. Squires]

I've been running 7.X on a Tyan S4881 (4 dual-core Opteron CPUs) since 
nearly the beginning of the 7.X cycle, and have just started to see 
watchdog timeouts on the Broadcom bge0 GigE port.

This occurs with a kernel and world compiled on 11/22, and also with a 
kernel compiled on 11/11 with the 11/22 world.

The errors occur when copying a large number (200-300GB) of files over
a GigE network to a WD USB drive attached to a PC running XP.

There are no Ethernet errors other than those caused by the timeouts.

The system uses an nVidia PCI-Express video board and an LSA 300-8X SATA
card which have not given any problems.  I have not been able, however, to
add a SCSI card and I've tried every Adaptec and LSI PCI, PCI-X, and 
PCI-Express card available to me.  The problem appears to be a mismatch of
the interrupt expected by the card and the interrupt provided by the board.
I haven't found a solution for that problem (yet).

The error is the usual watchdog timeout:

Nov 27 15:34:11 superxeon kernel: bge0: watchdog timeout -- resetting
Nov 27 15:34:11 superxeon kernel: bge0: link DOWN
Nov 27 15:34:11 superxeon kernel: bge0: link state changed to DOWN
Nov 27 15:34:15 superxeon kernel: bge0: link state changed to UP

I intend to switch over to an Intel Pro1000 card since I saw the same 
problem some timea ago on another box and switching GigE hardware solved 
the problem.

uname -a:

FreeBSD superxeon.familysquires.net 7.4-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 7.4-PRERELEASE 
#12: Mon Nov 22 15:45:36 EST 2010 
root at superxeon.familysquires.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/OPTERON8  amd64

dmesg output for bge0/1:

bge0: <Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Controller, ASIC rev. 0x002003> mem 0
xd0110000-0xd011ffff,0xd0100000-0xd010ffff irq 26 at device 2.0 on pci17
bge0: Reserved 0x10000 bytes for rid 0x10 type 3 at 0xd0110000
bge0: CHIP ID 0x00002003; ASIC REV 0x02; CHIP REV 0x20; PCI-X
miibus0: <MII bus> on bge0
bge0: bpf attached
bge0: Ethernet address: 00:e0:81:58:2d:e3
bge0: [MPSAFE]
bge0: [ITHREAD]
bge1: <Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Controller, ASIC rev. 0x002003> mem 0
xd0130000-0xd013ffff,0xd0120000-0xd012ffff irq 27 at device 2.1 on pci17
bge1: Reserved 0x10000 bytes for rid 0x10 type 3 at 0xd0130000
bge1: CHIP ID 0x00002003; ASIC REV 0x02; CHIP REV 0x20; PCI-X
miibus1: <MII bus> on bge1
bge1: bpf attached
bge1: Ethernet address: 00:e0:81:58:2d:e4
bge1: [MPSAFE]
bge1: [ITHREAD]
bge0: link state changed to UP

Mike Squires
mikes at siralan.org