i386/81019: RealTek 8169S32 behaves erratically

[Pascal de Bruijn]

>Number:         81019
>Category:       i386
>Synopsis:       RealTek 8169S32 behaves erratically
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    freebsd-i386
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Sat May 14 14:20:00 GMT 2005
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Pascal de Bruijn
>Release:        5.4-RELEASE
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD archilles.home.lan 5.4-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE #0: Sun May 8 10:21:06 UTC 2005    root at harlow.xse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386
>Description:
I have two RealTek 8169S32 network cards, which behave erratically under FreeBSD 5.4. When booting the machine the NIC doesn't come up, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

If it doesn't it may take a while and then it just spontaneously works again. 

Once working, they seems to remain working until I power down.


re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
        options=1b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING>
        inet 192.168.2.10 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
        inet6 fe80::20e:2eff:fe2c:4d97%re0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        ether 00:0e:2e:2c:4d:97
        media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
        status: active

I also tried diffing the ifconfig when my NIC was working, and when it wasn't working, but there we're no differences!

Enabling/Disabling of TXCSUM/RXCSUM didn't seem to matter.
>How-To-Repeat:
There is no way to deterministically reprocedure the problem, generally at about half my boot-ups the NIC refuses the work properly.
>Fix:
No known fix... Maybe rebooting a couple of times, until I get lucky and it works...


>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: