Watchdog Timeout - bge devices

[John Marshall]

$ dmesg | grep bge
bge0: <Broadcom BCM5705K Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x3003> mem
0xe8200000-0xe820ffff irq 17 at device 4.0 on pci4
miibus1: <MII bus> on bge0
bge0: Ethernet address: 00:0b:cd:e7:51:ba
bge0: watchdog timeout -- resetting
bge0: link state changed to DOWN
bge0: link state changed to UP

I initially pronounced the network cable dead and replaced it. Then I
suspected the FastEthernet switch port and relocated to a different
port. Watchdog timeouts persisted. I concluded that the bge hardware
must be flaky until I read a recent thread on em device watchdog
timeouts which led me to wonder about CPU scheduling.

The server experiencing the bge timeouts was using SCHED_ULE. I built
6.2-PRERELEASE on a spare disk and booted the problem server from that
disk - bge problem persisted.

We have a second (identical) problem-free server configured with
SCHED_4BSD. I reconfigured both machines so that the first machine (now
6.2-PRERELEASE) used SCHED_4BSD and the second machine (6.1-RELEASE)
uses SCHED_ULE. Both machines are configured with PREEMPTION.

+-----------------------------------------------+
| THE PROBLEM FOLLOWS SCHED_ULE ACROSS MACHINES |
+-----------------------------------------------+

The machines are hp ProLiant ML110 servers.

There is nothing sharing the interrupt with the bge device. No USB
drivers are loaded.


$ vmstat -i
interrupt                          total       rate
irq1: atkbd0                          70          0
irq6: fdc0                             9          0
irq14: ata0                      1234430          6
irq15: ata1                           47          0
irq17: bge0                     17543591         93
irq26: fxp0                        70832          0
cpu0: timer                    376381765       1999
Total                          395230744       2099


$ sysctl kern.version kern.sched kern.smp hw.machine hw.model dev.bge
kern.version: FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE-p10 #1: Mon Oct  2 08:36:56 AEST 2006

kern.sched.name: ule
kern.sched.slice_min: 10
kern.sched.slice_max: 142
kern.sched.preemption: 1
kern.smp.maxcpus: 1
kern.smp.active: 0
kern.smp.disabled: 0
kern.smp.cpus: 1
hw.machine: i386
hw.model: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz
dev.bge.0.%desc: Broadcom BCM5705K Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x3003
dev.bge.0.%driver: bge
dev.bge.0.%location: slot=4 function=0
dev.bge.0.%pnpinfo: vendor=0x14e4 device=0x1654 subvendor=0x103c
subdevice=0x1654 class=0x020000
dev.bge.0.%parent: pci4

Is there any other information I ought to post to help with diagnosis -
or is this a known problem? (I've only subscribed recently)

John Marshall.