Re: Various problems with re(4) on a PCIe 8168/8111B onboard NIC

On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 01:27:36PM -0700, Kent Stewart wrote:
On Sunday 29 July 2007, Michael Nottebrock wrote:
After recently updating the windows drivers (I dual-boot Windows XP
on the machine the NIC is in), I hit this problem:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_RTL8168#Troubleshooting which affects
re(4) like it does the Linux drivers described in the above link.

I already wrote the Realtek technical support about it since their
"own" FreeBSD driver (a hacked rl(4) that does not support any of the
chip's advanced features) does not manage to power up the PHY on its
own either - neither does the motherboard's BIOS when trying to
netboot.

The other problem is that I have at least two applications
misbehaving when rxcsum/txcsum is enabled:

- The Linux Second Life client (yes, yes, I know, but it is nice for
showing off GLX and it is really really good at generating network
traffic) will cease to receive data after about a minute or so -
turning off rcxsum/txcsum will mend it on the spot.

- A Fedora Core 4 running in Qemu, networked with bridge(4) and
tap(4), cannot receive an ip address via DHCP. Interestingly, this
even occurs if rxcsum/txcsum was already turned off before launching
Qemu - to make it work, I have to cycle rxcsum/txcsum once. Might be
related to promiscuous mode.

I realise that both of these make awful test cases, but so far they
are the only applications I found to expose those problems.

This is on FreeBSD kiste 6.2-STABLE FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE #4: Sat Jul 28
14:11:23 CEST 2007 root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/KISTE-SMP i386.
The kernel sources are up to date as of 2007-07-27.

The NIC is re0: <RealTek 8168/8111B PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port
0xd800-0xd8ff mem 0xfbfff000-0xfbffffff irq 36 at device 0.0 on pci3
/ re0@pci3:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x81681849 chip=0x816810ec
rev=0x01 hdr=0x00.

Have you looked at /var/log/messages? I would be surprised if you have
not had a number of

Jul 27 00:55:32 ruby kernel: re0: watchdog timeout
Jul 27 00:55:32 ruby kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
Jul 27 00:55:35 ruby kernel: re0: link state changed to UP

People have complained a long time ago and basically given up on getting
it fixed.


You should not see the watdog errors on re(4).
If you still see the watchdog timeout errors, please let me know.

--
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon
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