rl driver and 4GB RAM

[Chuck Swiger]

On Oct 17, 2006, at 10:06 AM, Tobias P. Santos wrote:
> We recently bought a Dell Server with 4GB RAM.
> Then, we installed FreeBSD 6.1/i386 but it only detects 3.5GB of  
> RAM. So we recompiled the kernel with PAE option and now we have  
> 4GB available.

It might be reasonable to simply live with getting 3.5GB of RAM out  
of the system.

> Onboard NIC (em0) works fine both with GENERIC and PAE kernel, but  
> as we need a second 100 Mbit NIC, we plugged a Realtek 8139D board,  
> but it doesn't work with PAE kernel (GENERIC is fine).

I'm not too surprised-- that Realtek chipset is among the worst  
10/100 NICs on the market.  Bin it.

> If you do a tcpdump, you can see packets and arp requests on the  
> network, but we can't ping anything. It seems that we can only  
> "listen" on rl0 but not "speak". Once we reboot the server with  
> GENERIC kernel, the NIC works fine.
> We also tried 5.4/amd64, but the behaviour is the same as we have  
> with PAE.
>
> Any suggestions? Could it be a driver related problem, so if we  
> change to another NIC it may work?

Oh, yes-- try adding an Intel 10/100 fxp NIC, or maybe a DEC 21x4x  
"Tulip" dc NIC instead.

-- 
-Chuck