XenServer 6.5(SP1) - HVM 're0: watchdog timeout' errors...

[Roger Pau Monné]

El 07/09/15 a les 14.58, Karl Pielorz ha escrit:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We have a bunch of FreeBSD 10.1 hosts we run the NIC's as HVM (this
> avoids a known networking issue with XenServer and PV networks under
> FreeBSD to do with routing packets for other Xen DomU).
> 
> This seems to work OK - but recently we've had a whole bunch of:
> 
>  Sep  7 12:41:08 host1 kernel: re0: watchdog timeout
> ...
>  Sep  7 12:42:03 host1 kernel: re1: watchdog timeout
> 
> 
> This seems to 'break' networking for the guest. I've tried doing
> 'ifconfig re0 down / ifconfig re0 up' - this doesn't appear to fix
> things - but rebooting the DomU guest does (when it comes back,
> networking is restored).
> 
> Searching around with Google turns up some similar issues with NetBSD
> along with the comment that the QEMU Realtek card doesn't have watchdog
> emulation - so it should be disabled in the driver.
> 
> How applicable to FreeBSD that is, I don't know.
> 
> This seems to happen when the VM's are migrated (e.g. Xen Storage
> Motion) from one SR to another - or migrated, full stop (i.e. from one
> XenServer to another - but using shared storage).

This sounds like a problem in the if_re driver on FreeBSD or a bug in
Qemu emulation. As a workaround, could you try to use the emulated e1000
instead of the realtek? AFAIK it should also provide better performance.

Since you are using XenServer I'm not sure of the exact rune, with OSS
Xen you basically need to add "model=e1000" to the network configuration
line.

Roger.