Problem with nfe stability and throughput

[Chris Poulsen]

Hi,

Pyun YongHyeon wrote:
> Did you have to bring nfe(4) down and up manually due to network lockups?
>   

Yes, I did it manually.

> Maybe this would come from atphy(4) bug. atphy(4) does not seem to
> reliabily detect an established link.
>   

I saw several nfe0 down/up messages in my log after i did the manual
down/up, but they stopped appearing as I stopped stressing the link.

>  > ifconfig nfe0 yields:
>  > 
>  > 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 autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
>  >        status: active
>  > 
>
> How about the following change?
> From /usr/src/sys/dev/mii/athpy.c:
>     288         ssr = PHY_READ(sc, ATPHY_SSR);
>     289         if ((((bmcr & BMCR_AUTOEN) != 0) && ((bmsr & BMSR_ACOMP) == 0)) ||
>     290             (ssr & ATPHY_SSR_SPD_DPLX_RESOLVED) == 0) {
>     291                 /* Erg, still trying, I guess... */
>     292                 mii->mii_media_active |= IFM_NONE;
>     293                 return;
>     294         }
>
> To:
>     288         ssr = PHY_READ(sc, ATPHY_SSR);
>     289         if ((ssr & ATPHY_SSR_SPD_DPLX_RESOLVED) == 0) {
>     290                 /* Erg, still trying, I guess... */
>     291                 mii->mii_media_active |= IFM_NONE;
>     292                 return;
>     293         }
>   

I applied the patch and rebooted the server remotely earlier this day
(was feeling a little adventurous). The driver seems to run somewhat
stable (not fast and not 100% reliable, but good enough for my current
usage). When I get home, I'll try stressing the network some, to see how
badly it misbehaves. I tried pinging the machine and the result of that
is that 10-20 pings are OK and then usually a single timeout follows and
then another 10-20 OK pings etc.

SSH transfer from the machine does not look to be especially fast, it
seemed to settle around 150 Kilo byte / sec (I'm able to pull around
1,3-2,0 MB/sec off this one using rl0 (there is some wlan involved so
transfer speeds are not as reliable as the ftp uploads from my other bsd
machine.

> Thanks for your patience and testing.
>   

I'd like to get my HW up and running :) - and I don't mind going through
a little trouble, if it can help fbsd get even better. So I also
appreciate you taking your time to give this a shot.

I'll drop a mail when I get home tomorrow and have had a chance to beat
up the network a little ;)

-- 
Regards Chris