em(4) on FreeBSD is sometimes annoying

[Martin]

Am Mon, 4 Aug 2008 12:12:24 -0700
schrieb "Jack Vogel" <jfvogel at gmail.com>:

> OK, so your EEPROM is does not have the bug. As I was
> saying before, I would like to see what back to back behavior is.
> 
> And, BTW, back to back does NOT mean hook to the switch,
> that's the very thing that is suspicious. It means NIC to NIC,
> no DHCP, assigned addresses.  And then see that you pass
> traffic, and then unhook cable, see if link goes down, reconnect
> and it should go up.

With no /etc/rc.d/netif script involved during startup everything
always works as expected.

If I comment the line ifconfig_re0="DHCP" and start my laptop. I can
assign the address. I can ping the other NIC. If can unhook the cable
the LED goes off, link goes down, I can plug it in again, I can ping
again.

I have also no problems if I start without ifconfig_re0="DHCP" and run
"dhclient em0" while ethernet cable is unplugged. If I plug it in
again, everything works like above.

But:
If I startup with ifconfig_em0="DHCP" AND (binary and!) no cable nothing
of this works correctly.

There must be something ifconfig_em="DHCP" causes on startup that
running dhclient does not cause and that provokes the dead state.

> Oh, and exactly what kernel, and driver revision are you using.

Kernel is FreeBSD-STABLE compile date Mon Aug 4 13:41:43 CEST 2008.
It's GENERIC. The em(4) driver is the one used in this STABLE version
of yesterday.



I should perhaps mention that I have some other problems with this
laptop. I cannot boot with a PCMCIA wireless card (atheros) already in
the slot, or I get 100% load on cbb(4) and the system is not usable. If
I boot without the Atheros card and I plug it in later, it mostly is
detected.

AND I get sometimes an NMI when Atheros card is in use AND (binary and
again!) the laptop is on battery. This happens also on Linux.

AND the laptop will almost never recognize the Atheros card, if I am
using a text terminal with high resolution (set by vidcontrol MODE_280
with VESA support compiled in; cannot reproduce now, because I'm
using GENERIC).

I don't know if these things are related. I will get some other laptop
in one or two months. I hope these things won't bother me anymore.

--
Martin
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