>On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Hans Maes <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Although it is definately related to the type of NIC's in the watchguard >> boards, I'm still not completely convinced this is 100% a hardware problem >> since the Watchguard Linux OS seems to work just fine on it. Sounds more >> like a FreeBSD driver problem to me, and therefore not directly related to >> pfsense. >> > >It's not a hardware problem any more than the countless workarounds >already in the Realtek drivers for hardware bugs are hardware >problems, it's likely just yet another quirk in a different >implementation of the same chipset that isn't worked around in >FreeBSD. It's most likely a hardware quirk with a software work around >that doesn't exist in FreeBSD (7.2 at least).
I have put in quite a bit of time into getting this to work, along with Pyun YongHyeon, the current maintainer of the Realtek driver(s) in FreeBSD. He has sent me several patches and has had me set several other options, and I repeatedly flashed new pfSense builds and tested the changes (he and I were at this for about a month). While his initial changes made a big difference and greatly reduced the watchdog timeouts, we could never completely eliminate them. Before I became involved, the problem was much, much worse than it is today. However, Pyun ran out of ideas and needed to move on to other things (understandably). We were working against 8 prior to its release. I would really like to see this work reliably at some point. From what I can tell, this problem is not limited to just Fireboxes, it is on pretty much all NICs that have RTL8139C+ chips on them. > >> Has anyone tested pfsense 2.0 on these fireboxes ? >> Since it is based on a newer version of FreeBSD, maybe an updated NIC driver >> solves these issues ? >> > >If anyone has any interest in putting in the time to help get it >fixed, that's where I would start, and post any problems to the >freebsd-net list. 2.0 is based on RELENG_8, what will become 8.1. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] Commercial support available - https://portal.pfsense.org
