Broadcomm BCM4401-B0 and memory upgrade issue.

[Mark Tinguely]

On  Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 13:05:16 +0100, "Mykhailo Lyubich" <m.lyubich at suzlon.de> said:

>  After the memory upgrade on my Laptop (HP nx5000) FreeBSD 6.0 stable,
>  the driver for NIC bfe0 (Broadcom BCM4401-B0) stops working. The NIC LED
>  lights are on. The bfe0 interface is up and active. However, I got a
>  permanent message on the console:
>
>  bfe0: watching timeout -- resetting.
>
>  This occurs in the case when I compile the new kernel without bfe driver
>  and load the bfe driver as module (if_bfe.ko). In the case when the
>  driver is compiled into the kernel, the system stalls during the boot or
>  whenever I try to configure the interface.
		-----
I am CC this to a few people on the freebsd-current list that had
somewhat simular symptoms with other hardware.
		-----
Have you tried to boot with the old contigmalloc using the sysctl
option "vm.old_contigmalloc=1"?

Some people are seeing slow boot/configuration with new style
vm_page_alloc_contig/contigmalloc.

I am doing some profiling of vm_page_alloc_contig() and have found
that larger physical memory configurations makes these problems much worse.

I identified 4-5 places that can be changed to decrease the number
of page tables that is needed to be checked before an allocating a range.
Some of the changes will only occasionally save a few page checks, but
others changes could save several hundred or more page checks on every call.

The old contigmalloc could be optimized also, but it uses the lower
addressed physical pages, which turns out to be used less during the
boot process than the upper addressed physical pages.

--Mark Tinguely