Apparent fxp regression in FreeBSD 8.4-RC3

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 09:21:17PM -0400, Glen Barber wrote:
> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 06:09:43PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> > On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 08:18:33PM -0400, Michael L. Squires wrote:
> > > I've just tested 8.4-RC3 using a different Supermicro 1U box with a fresh
> > > installation of 8.4-RC3.  I had problems with the installation, wouldn't
> > > boot until I used a Windows 98 FDISK to write a master boot record
> > > (no idea why; this system uses an Adaptec SATA 1.5 6-channel PCI-X
> > > board with two
> > > drives in RAID 1).
> > > 
> > > Using the em0 interface there are no problems with DHCP; when I
> > > switch to the fxp0 interface the interface starts going up/down in
> > > the same manner as reported.
> > > 
> > > The problem appears associated with "world", not with the kernel (running
> > > the 8.4 kernel with the 8.3 world does not have this problem).
> > > 
> > > This motherboard is an X5DPL-iGM with 2 Xeon 2.8GHz CPUs and 4 GB of RAM.
> > > The other unit (an earlier board) has a Serverworks chipset with a single
> > > Xeon CPU but also with a 100Mbit Intel Pro100 Ethernet port and a 1000Mbit
> > > Intel Pro1000 Ethernet port.
> > > 
> > > This unit isn't doing anything useful, so testing isn't a problem.
> > 
> > Mike, Yong-Hyeon asked you a very important question which you didn't
> > answer:
> > 
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-May/073458.html
> > 
> > If you assign a static IP address, does fxp0 behave properly?
> > 
> > I'm also re-adding Yong-Hyeon to the CC list here.
> > 
> 
> At this point, I am not convinced we have a problem with what will turn
> out to be 8.4-RELEASE.
> 
> There have been several attempts to ensure the upgraded version is
> actually 8.4-RC3 (and again, 'uname -a' is not provided in this
> email...).
> 
> I find it very hard to believe that we have exactly one fxp(4) user
> upgrading to 8.4-*.
> 
> I'd really like to make sure that this is not an issue that will affect
> an uncountable number of users, but truthfully, at this point have to
> consider it a local configuration problem.

I have numerous Supermicro 1U boxes sitting in my garage from closing
down my hosting organisation back in August 2012.  I am certain one or
two of them have Intel NICs that use fxp(4) -- the problem is that I
don't know what exact NIC and PHY model they use.

>From what I can tell, there are at least two systems Mike has which
experience this anomaly.  One of those systems' dmesg:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-May/073440.html

The relevant lines start at "fxp0: <Intel 82551 ..." and continue all
the way down to "pci0:0:8:0: bad VPD cksum, remain 14".  I'm not sure if
the bad VPD checksum message is relevant to the fxp0 device or not.

The 2nd system is mentioned above/in this post:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-May/073530.html

But there's no verbose dmesg etc. for the 2nd system so I don't know if
it has the same NIC/PHY.

The model of NIC and PHY matters greatly; most users don't seem to
realise how important this is, they think in terms of "Intel vs.
Broadcom vs. Realtek".

Output from "pciconf -lvbc", specifically the lines relevant to the fxp0
device, from both systems, would be highly beneficial.

In the meantime, I'll head down to my garage to see if I can find those
fxp(4) boxes and see if they're 85551s (I sure hope I haven't pulled the
CPUs/RAM from them).  If I find a match, I can try to reproduce this.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at koitsu.org |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                http://jdc.koitsu.org/ |
| Mountain View, CA, US                                            |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.             PGP 4BD6C0CB |