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Date:      Mon, 3 Jun 2013 20:59:45 +0000
From:      Sebastian Kuzminsky <S.Kuzminsky@F5.com>
To:        "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org" <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   bce kernel page faults and NMIs (was: Strange reboot since 9.1)
Message-ID:  <73664E92-986C-4582-9A43-EFA576931318@f5.com>

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Howdy folks, this email is a follow-on to a 3-month-old thread about kernel=
 page faults from the bce driver[0].

0:  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-March/072713.htm=
l

Sorry to revive such an old thread, but a couple of bits of new information=
 has come to light here that may be useful for others.

The header splitting suggestion that Marius Strobl  made[1] did fix the ker=
nel page fault rooted in bce_intr() that we were seeing (and that other fol=
ks reported in the original thread).  I'm no bce expert, but it looks to me=
 like the bce driver does not apply the same flow control to its page queue=
 as it does to its receive queue, maybe that's related to the problem?

1:  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-March/072766.htm=
l

After disabling bce header splitting we stopped getting kernel page faults,=
 but we still had problems with this NIC (Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5716 Gig=
abit Ethernet) producing frequent PCI errors and occasional NMIs.

I found this thread[2] that suggests that the NIC firmware version may be r=
elevant to the NMI problem.  The Red Hat people are reporting that firmware=
 version 6.0.1 is bad and 6.4.5 is good; 9.1 ships with 6.0.17, so who know=
s what that means...  We ended up reverting to the bce driver from FreeBSD =
7 and that fixed our NMI problems.  (The bce driver from FreeBSD 7 also has=
 header splitting disabled by default: Bonus!)

2:  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3D693542


--=20
Sebastian Kuzminsky=



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