Problem with nfe stability and throughput

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 10:58:11PM +0100, Chris Poulsen wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > Pyun YongHyeon wrote:
 > ><snip>
 > >Based on hardware information from Linux l1 driver I wrote a simple
 > >PHY driver. You can get the diff at the following URL.
 > >Would you give it spin?
 > >
 > >http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/atphy.diff
 > >
 > >Note, I don't have the hardware so don't know whether it works or
 > >not. Just compile tested. I also have no PHY hardware information
 > >so the model name in the driver may not reflect real name.
 > >
 > >  
 > Thank you for your reply. I tried building a new kernel with your patch 
 > and loaded nfe0 instead of the old rl0 I'm currently using. It came up 
 > nicely with the following entries in dmesg:
 > 
 > ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
 > ata3: [ITHREAD]
 > nfe0: <NVIDIA nForce MCP67 Networking Adapter> port 0xc880-0xc887 mem 
 > 0xdfefc000-0xdfefcfff,0xdfefe400-0xdfefe4ff,0xdfefe0
 > 00-0xdfefe00f irq 23 at device 10.0 on pci0
 > miibus0: <MII bus> on nfe0
 > atphy0: <Atheros F1 Gigabit PHY> PHY 1 on miibus0
 > atphy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT-FDX, auto
 > nfe0: Ethernet address: 00:1d:60:6d:73:ec
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > nfe0: [FILTER]
 > pcib2: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 11.0 on pci0
 > pci2: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib2
 > 
 > Things seemed to work, so I decided to try and transfer a couple of big 
 > files to it using ftp. First file went really well, transfer finished 
 > reporting a transfer speed of 7.68 megabyte/sec - a performance that 
 > seems ok, taking my network equipment into account ;)
 > 

Good, it looks like a step forward to right direction. I didn't even
think atphy(4) can establish a valid link.

 > After transferring the file, the ftp client said "entering passive mode" 
 > preparing for the next file and then things froze up. (Well only the 
 > network.) The M2N-VM machine stopped responding to ping, ssh, ftp. I 
 > could not find anything in /var/log/messages, I tried pulling the 
 > interface down and up, but it didn't bring it back to life.
 > 

Would you show me the output of "ifconfig nfe0"?

 > What do you need me to do, in order to get some usable info about what 
 > is going on?
 > 

What about changing /usr/src/sys/dev/mii/atphy.c as the following?
>From atphy.c, line number 174:
171                 /*
172                  * Reset the PHY so all changes take effect.
173                  */
174                 if (IFM_SUBTYPE(ife->ifm_media) != IFM_AUTO) {
175                         bmcr = PHY_READ(sc, MII_BMCR);
176                         PHY_WRITE(sc, MII_BMCR, bmcr | BMCR_RESET);
177                 }
178                 break;

To:
171                 /*
172                  * Reset the PHY so all changes take effect.
173                  */
174                 bmcr = PHY_READ(sc, MII_BMCR);
175                 PHY_WRITE(sc, MII_BMCR, bmcr | BMCR_RESET);
176                 break;

As you know, no public documentation for the phy is available so
it would take long time to find a clue to support the hardware.
Please don't give up and lets try possible (still guessing)
combinations.

-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon