On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Dimitri Rodis ><dimit...@integritasystems.com> wrote: >> >> 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. >> > >There is something specific about the Fireboxes (and some other >scenarios), but the re(4) driver isn't always that problematic. I have >at least two boxes that function normally even under heavy load with >such cards. Yes, the re(4) driver is considered stable-- but it depends on which Realtek chip you're talking about. The RTL8139C+ chip specifically has (and has had) this problem since 6.x from what I can tell, and there were/are apparently a number of things were causing timeouts. A good portion of those issues have been fixed by Pyun over the last couple of years, (which have reduced the occurence of timeouts with RTL8139C+ chips--this I can personally attest to), but there are some other "undiscovered" cases where they still occur. I am also willing to put more time into testing/fixing it, but when the maintainer of the driver itself cries uncle, I'm not going to twist his arm unless I have something that makes sense for him to change (and I am out of ideas).
What he believes is that there is some undocumented change (or bug) in that chip that we wouldn't have any hope of fixing without an engineer from Realtek. So, if anyone has any connections, the entire "FreeBSD-Realtek-RTL8139C+-using" community would likely thank you.....profusely even :)
