Re: strange arp problem with bge nics

On Friday 31 August 2007 21:55, Tobias Ernst wrote:
Hi,

I have further news on this problem. It really seems to be a
driver/hardware issue.

As I said, the two servers have 6 NICs each. These are:

bge0, bge1: BCM5750, integrated on the motherboard
bge2, bge3: BCM5704, PCIX card
bge4, bge5: BCM5704, PCIX card

I have now greatly simplified the test case: Only connect any two
interfaces with the same number with a crosslink cable or an otherwise
unused switch. Assign two IP addresses from within the same subnet.
E.g., make bge0 on machine #1 10.0.0.1 and bge0 on machine #2 10.0.0.2.
Don't connect anything else.

I can instantly ping the other machine after booting up when using bge0,
bge1 or bge2 on both machines.

I cannot initially ping the other machine when using bge3, bge4 or bge5.
In this case, I first have to put one of the interfaces into
promiscuous mode, wait for the ping to come through, then disable
promiscuous mode.

Incidentally, the working interfaces all sit on IRQ3, while the other
three sit on IRQ7, IRQ11 and IRQ5, respectively.

Where do I take this from here? I need at least four interfaces working
for the configuration I need to implement. I could do away with the
other two, but four is the minimum I need.

Incidentally, another option to "wake up" the ping, apart from setting
and unsetting promiscous modem, is to connect any Windows machine to the
same switch. As soon as a Windows machine is present on the switch, the
ping between the two FreeBSD machines works right out from the start.

This looks like a minor issue at first glance, because everything seems
to be normal once the ping is set going, and I could just write a script
that enables promiscuous mode on startup for a certain amount of time,
and there will always be Windows boxes on the network anyway. However, I
am now wary that there might be other hidden bugs or hardware problems,
and I have no use for those in a production machine ...


If you take a look here http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bge.c
you will see some problems with some chipsets regarding auto negotiation.
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=94833

How all these apply to your case?
Did you try "down-ing" and "up-ing" the interfaces?
Did you try without forcing a link speed(check ifconfig -m)

Just wild guesses...

HTH, Nikos
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