Marvell chipsets on 8-CURRENT and XP x64 won't talk with one another

[Tom Judge]

Garrett Cooper wrote:
> Mike Silbersack wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>
>>>> Just to clarify, how are the two hooked together?  Is it over 
>>>> gigabit switch, a 10mbps hub, or directly cabled together?
>>>>
>>>> -Mike
>>>
>>>   Sure. They're both connected over a gigabit switch, but the Windows 
>>> driver's kind of sketchy because it keeps on switching between 
>>> 100MBit and 1GBit. I haven't really paid that much attention to what 
>>> speed the FreeBSD msk driver is registering at.
>>> -Garrett
>>
>> Ah ha!
>>
>> I had the flopping between 100mbps and 1gbps problem with some Intel 
>> cards once - some of the machines in the lab were fine, others kept 
>> switching back and forth.  We eventually narrowed it down to the 
>> cables we had hand-made; some of them just weren't up to snuff, and 
>> the NIC apparently decided that it had to go back down to 100.
>>
>> I think you should switch your gigabit switch out for a 100mbps switch 
>> and see if the network becomes more reliable.
>>
>> -Mike
> 
>    I think I've discovered what the issue is. I believe the problem lies 
> in the fact that the FreeBSD Marvell chipset driver (msk) isn't up to 
> speed with the Gigabit transferring on my particular chipset(s). That's 
> why transfers were most likely working with my laptop (Apple with 
> 100MBit Broadcom) vs my desktop (Asus MB with another Marvell chipset 
> driver) and another laptop (Dell laptop with Broadcom Gigabit).
>    How do I tell ifconfig via rc.conf to downgrade the max speed to 
> 100MBit duplex?
> Thanks,
> -Garrett

You would need to hard code the interface configuration on the switch 
and box.  This is only possible if you have a managed switch and the 
methods on the switch are manufacturer and model dependent.

On FreeBSD however it is trivial for example "ifconfig em0 media 
100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex".

This will disable speed negotiation and therefore must be configured at 
both ends of the link.

Tom