Problems with em0 failing to initialize on stable?

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 02:02:51PM +0200, Ben Stuyts wrote:
> On 17 apr 2008, at 13:20, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 06:32:32PM +0900, gnn at freebsd.org wrote:
>>> I am running 7-STABLE with machines that are net booted.  On occasion,
>>> that is not with any level of predictability, this happens:
>>>
>>> em0: Hardware Initialization Failed
>>> em0: Unable to initialize the hardware
>>>
>>> which of course stops the machine in its tracks.  A normal dmesg is
>>> also included.
>>>
>>> Any steps I should take to help debug this?
>>
>> George, can you provide the following?
>>
>> * Motherboard type and model (a URL to the board would be good)
>> * kenv | grep smbios
>> * pciconf -lv
>
> I have seen this too. A couple of times on a new server here. Maybe one in 
> two or three reboots. So far, it only happens after a reboot, but not after 
> a hard reset or power cycle. This board has 3 em network if's. Two on the 
> board itself, and one on a daughter card on the ipmi add-on card. It is 
> always em0 that is giving trouble. The board is a Supermicro X7DBP-i: 
> <http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/xeon1333/5000P/X7DBP-i.cfm>

I'm wondering if the IPMI add-on is what's doing it.  However, the IPMI
cards compatible with the X7DBP all have a dedicated NIC (versus
piggybacking on top of the existing mainboards' NICs, which almost
always causes problems of the mysterious sort).  I'm not sure, but I
don't think em0 will be that NIC.

Both you and George have boards that use the 82563EB.  jv@ will have to
help with this one.  I wonder if it's a BIOS bug of some kind, where
something on the NIC isn't getting reset by the BIOS on a soft boot...

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |