em, bge, network problems survey.

[Michal Mertl]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 05:14:27PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > I'm seeing some patterns here with all of the network driver problem 
> > reports, but I need more information to help narrow it down further.
> > I ask all of you who are having problems to take a minute to fill
> > out this survey and return it to Kris Kennaway (on cc:) and myself.
> > Thanks.
> > 
> > 1. Are you experiencing network hangs and/or "timeout" messages on the 
> > console?  If yes, please provide a _brief_ description of the problem.
> 
> OK, next question, to all em users:
> 
> If your em device is using a shared interrupt, and you are NOT
> experiencing timeout problems when using this device, please let me
> know.

I haven't seen any timeout message in long time but I experience frozen
network (and also the already reported panic when doing ifconfig down/up
then).

I have also seen strange problem which may be completely unrelated: When
doing 'find . -ls' on SMB mounted drive - find was spitting the contents
of the drive but never finishes. Network seemed dead but when I
interrupted find with Ctrl-C I got the replies to the pings sent when it
was running (e.g. thousands ms) - this looks like something was
preventing RX to work and the packets were just queued somewhere. I
belive I should be able to easily reproduce it.

genius# vmstat -i
interrupt                          total       rate
irq0: clk                       43784465       1000
irq1: atkbd0                       66248          1
irq5: pcm0                          5877          0
irq8: rtc                        5603682        128
irq9: acpi0                         8820          0
irq11: fwohci0 em*                205749          4
irq12: psm0                       586848         13
irq14: ata0                       340844          7
irq15: ata1                           61          0
Total                           50602594       1155

I don't think I remember debug.mpsafenet tunable being mentioned in the
threads about the problems. It prevents all the problems on my system
(UP non-APIC system), including the SMB issue mentioned above.

Michal