You might be interested in some unofficial patches I had created when
experiencing the same thing. I hadn't officially released these
because of the awful DELAY() timeout hack taken from the original nfe
code from DragonFly BSD. Most of the updates were taken from NetBSD.
Either way, what you would be interested in is the encap_delay stuff,
specifically the part in nfe.c where it actually assigns the variable:
case PCI_PRODUCT_NVIDIA_CK804_LAN1:
case PCI_PRODUCT_NVIDIA_CK804_LAN2:
+ sc->sc_encap_delay = 10;
+ break;
You would obviously have to locate where your interface matches and
assign it there. For me, my interface is a CK804. Not sure if it was
LAN1 or LAN2, but I assigned the delay to both anyway.
These patches seemed to work good for me, didn't experience any
timeouts, YMMV. Let me know if this works. These will apply cleanly
against 4.1-RELEASE.
http://lysergik.com/~tony/openbsd/
On 6/25/07, patrick keshishian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 6/24/07, Vijay Sankar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sunday 24 June 2007 13:50, patrick keshishian wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been noticing some strange problems with the built-in nfe0
> > interface on my desktop. Actually I've seen it on two such
> > computers, but the description below is for my current desktop PC.
> >
> > The PC is running `cvs up -dP -rOPENBSD_4_1' built. I'm including
> > netstat, ifconfig output[1] and dmesg below[2].
> >
> > I've noticed that once in a while the nfe0 interface will stop
> > sending and receiving data. At this point I can not make it work
> > again. The only solution I have is to reboot the box. I have
> > installed a dc0 card in the box since. The problem seemed
> > intermittent and not reliably reproducible. But I think I found
> > a way to reproduce this problem on demand (at least for the time
> > being). I have an ssh session to another box, on which I run
> > '/usr/bin/nm somelib.so'. After a page or two of output the
> > terminal "hangs". At this point nfe0 becomes unresponsive.
> >
> > I switch to the dc0 interface and the terminal finishes the output.
> > Running the nm command while using the dc0 interface doesn't cause
> > any problems.
>
> I experienced similar problems last year and can empathize.
>
> The following items improved my situation somewhat:
>
> 1) BIOS upgrade
> 2) Removing dual boot (I had both OpenBSD and Windows 2003 on one
> machine. There were more errors if I did not power off after shutting
> down Windows 2003 and just did a restart from within Windows. If I did
> not unplug the machine after shutting down Windows, most of the time I
> saw watchdog timeouts but if I powered off the host, and then powered
> it back on, there were fewer errors)
Both boxes I have run solely OpenBSD.
One thing that I did notice was that after switching to the dc0
interface for a short while (5 min or so?), I could switch back
to the nfe0 and it would start responding again. Basically:
# /sbin/ifconfig dc0 delete
# /sbin/route delete default
# /sbin/ifconfig nfe0 inet <IP> netmask <netmask> up
# /sbin/route add default <gateway>
Therefore, a reboot isn't the only way to "fix" the problem ("reset"
the interface) as I had previously thought. I am not sure exactly
what causes the interface to "reset": idle time, "no carrier", or
something completely random?
Either way, thanks for all the replies!
> I experimented with different combinations and different switches
> (10/100/1000, 10/100, and 10-Base-T). When all the hosts connected to a
> 10/100 switch were running at 100 MB/s then changing nfe0 from
> autoselect to full-duplex using
>
> ifconfig nfe0 media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
>
> seemed to eliminate nfe0 hangs as well as timeouts completely. I am not
> sure whether this has any rational basis or is specific to some weird
> situation in my network, but that has been my experience.
>
> Vijay
>
>
> >
> > Interestingly enough, if I redirect the output of nm to a file
> > and subsequently cat the file the nfe0 interface doesn't seem
> > to exhibit the same problem.
> >
> > I am not sure how to diagnose this problem further. I've enabled
> > debug on the nfe0 interface (/sbin/ifconfig nfe0 debug), but don't
> > see any output.
> >
> > Any and all suggestions are welcome.
> > --patrick
