Problem with nfe stability and throughput

[Chris Poulsen]

Hi,

Pyun YongHyeon wrote:
> Would you show me the output of "ifconfig nfe0"?
>   
nfe0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=48<VLAN_MTU,POLLING>
        ether 00:1d:60:6d:73:ec
        inet 192.168.1.11 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        media: Ethernet 100baseTX <full-duplex>
        status: active

>  > 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.
>
>   
Tried the changes. Things came up just fine. Ftp transfer worked, well 
my machine had a panic after 3 big files, but as far as i could tell it 
was zfs related (I was dropping the files on my zfs test partition ;))

Ftp client reported transfer speeds around 8,7 megabyte/sec until the 
panic. After a reboot I tried ssh/sftp and things ran seemingly stable.  
So I decided to beat it up with a torrent download :)
Finally I managed to get some text in my logs ;) :
....
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 4294967295 
pkt len 4294967295)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
last message repeated 9 times
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 4294967295 
pkt len 4294967295)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
last message repeated 10 times
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 7 pkt len 7)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
last message repeated 7 times
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 6 pkt len 6)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 5 pkt len 5)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 4 pkt len 4)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
last message repeated 7 times
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 5 pkt len 5)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
last message repeated 4 times
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 5 pkt len 5)
kernel: nfe0: discard frame w/o leading ethernet header (len 0 pkt len 0)
...

Things seemed to still be running, but ping to another local machine was 
sloooow.

HTH.

-- 
Regards Chris