em0 watchdog timeouts

[Jack Vogel]

Sorry, its a Monday morning, I was being kinda facetious, guess it didn't
work very well :) I apologize.

I know it must be annoying for you, its as much so for me when its something
I can't just fix because its not reproducible. So, I feel your pain.

Will try to restrain my Monday blues in the future.

Jack


On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Daniel Bond <db at danielbond.org> wrote:

> Hi Jack,
>
> I'll comment your mail inline:
>
>
> On Oct 5, 2009, at 6:57 PM, Jack Vogel wrote:
>
>  This posting just muddies the issue, first you talk about having a problem
>> that
>> involves Broadcom, ok, so post about that on something other than em :)
>>
>
> I only meant to indicate that the problem might exist outside the intel
> driver.
> I'm also indicating that it happens with several drivers (bge, bce and em)
> on several different machines, on both pci-x and pci-e.
>
> I'm sorry if this is confusing to you, but I still think it's relevant to
> mention.
>
>
>> Then you make some references to hardware that you "might have bought"
>> but didn't, I'm not about debugging 'possible worlds problems' though so
>> can't help you there either :)
>>
>
> No. I only made references to hardware I actually used, and had real-world
> issues with.
>
>
>> Finally you never say what the actual hardware is, other than a person who
>> I do not know told you it was the best performer... so, what exactly is
>> it?
>>
>
> Sepherosa is a guy that writes drivers for BSD based operating systems.
> Including FreeBSD. He has a lot of knowledge in this area.
> http://people.freebsd.org/~sephe/ <http://people.freebsd.org/%7Esephe/>
>
> The NIC you are referring to, the one sephe recommended me, is a 82571EB. I
> didn't mention specific hardware, as I think it's more important
> to note this is an issue I'm experiencing across different sets of hardware
> and drivers.
>
>
>> You have a problem once every 10 days,  and at a specific time no less,
>> this almost always means something in your environment, a cron job run
>> amok, a piece of hardware that resets, I dunno, but the last thing I would
>> suspect given this description is the driver.
>>
>
> This is not what I wrote. I wrote I had a problem every 1-10 days, but it
> would usually happen once every 3-4 days. At worst, every day in periods.
>
> It's not at any specific time. If you read my email correctly, I say it
> *usually* happens arround 11-13:00,
> but it has happened at random times too.
>
> This is my point exactly. I don't think it's the Intel-driver, I think the
> problem is elsewhere. I had a suspicion it had to do with the combination of
> nic + qlogic fc-controller, but I have no evidence of this.
>
>
>> You need a good sysadmin for this debugging I would venture, not a driver
>> developer.
>>
>
> What I need is useful advice/help. I never stated I needed a driver
> developer.
>
> I'd like to be able to run my favorite OS on cool hardware, in the future,
> for a high-performing NFS-server, without problems like I've experienced the
> past 6months, on a production system.
> Please note that I'm managing a server-park almost completely based on
> FreeBSD, and I'm running many NFS servers on other hardware, for other
> services, without issues.
>
> I've seen several other FreeBSD-users having problems with this too, so I
> think it's of importance for the project. As I mentioned originally, I'm
> happy to dispose the hardware to any FreeBSD developer
> that might want to look further into this. Debugging it further is above my
> skill-set, I don't even know where to begin looking, especially since I
> can't produce any panics.
>
> I'm sorry to say, but your reply was %0 useful, Jack.
>
>
>> Jack
>>
>>
> - Daniel
>