"RX ring hdr initialization error"

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 12:52:56PM +0200, Victor Ophof wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Hi 
> 
>  I've bought a asus M4a78-EM Motherboard.  to build a NAS on, 
> thinking the onboard Realtek would be sufficant speed 
> unfortunatly the onboard fives 16/31 mbs at best 
> 
> ps later It improved with enabeling "polling" in the kernel (duh) 
> 
> so I had a PCI intel GT nic around, what gave intermittent tcp/ip connections in a other machine (ESXi) 
> unfortunatly this was the same with Freebsd (card issue?) The card is still in the machine
> even with the Intel supplied BSD driver 
> 
> now I bought a PCIe intel CT nic, put it in and the kernel panic with 
> "RX ring hdr initialization error"
> so replaced the intel with the freebsd one by doing 
> intel overwrites the freebsd one /boot/kernel/if_em.ko 
> # cd /usr/src/sys/modules/em/ && make obj depend all install
> (was already in the kernel) 
>  
> 
> still panic 
> anybody got some idea's howto fix ? 
> 

I have been using the attached patch for em(4)/igb(4) controllers.
These drivers explicitly calls panic(9) when memory allocation
failure happens. I don't think it's good idea to panic the box
under resource shortage condition as it's common to see this
situation on heavily loaded servers.

The patch does not solve the one issue yet. The panic caused by
RX buffer allocation failure condition which in turn means you're
allocating a lot of buffers. Reduce number of descriptors if you 
increased that too high and see whether the issue could be gone.
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