Apparent fxp regression in FreeBSD 8.4-RC3

[Craig Rodrigues]

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:57 PM, Michael L. Squires <mikes at siralan.org>wrote:

> I upgraded to FreeBSD 8.4-RC3 and noticed a problem with the fxp driver on
> an older Supermicro single CPU single core Xeon motherboard.
>
> I know that 8.3-Release does not have this issue, but don't know when in
> the updates to that release the regression was introduced.
>
> I use the fxp driver to connect to a Motorola Surfboard cable modem, and
> immediately saw the following occur many times:
>
> May 10 23:00:04 familysquires kernel: fxp0: link state changed to DOWN
> May 10 23:00:04 familysquires dhclient: New Subnet Mask (fxp0):
> 255.255.240.0
> May 10 23:00:04 familysquires dhclient: New Broadcast Address (fxp0):
> 255.255.25
> 5.255
> May 10 23:00:04 familysquires dhclient: New Routers (fxp0): xx.xxx.xxx.1
> May 10 23:00:06 familysquires kernel: fxp0: link state changed to UP
> May 10 23:00:22 familysquires dhclient: New IP Address (fxp0):
> xx.xxx.xxx.163
> May 10 23:00:22 familysquires kernel: fxp0: link state changed to DOWN
> May 10 23:00:22 familysquires dhclient: New Subnet Mask (fxp0):
> 255.255.240.0
> May 10 23:00:22 familysquires dhclient: New Broadcast Address (fxp0):
> 255.255.255.255
> May 10 23:00:22 familysquires dhclient: New Routers (fxp0): xx.xxx.xxx.1
> May 10 23:00:24 familysquires kernel: fxp0: link state changed to UP
>
> repeated without end.
>


I recently upgraded one of my systems from FreeBSD 7.4 to FreeBSD releng/8,
and had DHCP problems.
My system though is running a bge NIC, not fxp.
I don't know if this solution can help your case, but I found
that this helped me.  I added the following line to my /etc/rc.conf:

synchronous_dhclient="YES"

Without that line, my system would not boot up properly with networking
working.

--
Craig