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Date:      Tue, 3 Nov 2009 22:21:27 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk>
To:        Tom Judge <tom@tomjudge.com>
Cc:        Pieter de Goeje <pieter@degoeje.nl>, Weldon S Godfrey 3 <weldon@excelsusphoto.com>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 8.0 - network stack crashes?
Message-ID:  <20091103221739.E75071@ury.york.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <4AF06017.6000505@tomjudge.com>
References:  <alpine.BSF.2.00.0911020747560.80499@emmett.excelsus.com> <hcnt4c$12i$1@ger.gmane.org> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0911021952220.1264@emmett.excelsus.com> <200911030937.11619.pieter@degoeje.nl> <alpine.BSF.2.00.0911030832320.36102@emmett.excelsus.com> <4AF05177.7030705@tomjudge.com> <4AF06017.6000505@tomjudge.com>

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On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Tom Judge wrote:
> Tom Judge wrote:
>> Weldon S Godfrey 3 wrote:
>>> we are using onboard NICs on the Dell using the bce driver.  We did try 
>>> several times to see if using an intel PCIexpress card using the em 
>>> driver, and we had the same symptoms.
>>> 
>>> Could the bce driver have the same leak?
>> 
>> The bce driver does not have a memory leak, it does however have a bug 
>> which causes memory fragmentation leading to denied mbuf allocation.
>> 
>> There is a work around for this in current, you can get the patch like 
>> this:
>> 
>> http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/head/
>> 
> That should be:
>
> svn diff -r 198319:198320 http://svn.freebsd.org/base/head
>
>> You need to put
>> 
>> options        BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT
>> 
>> In your kernel to enable the work arround.

Unless I'm missing something, these seem like they may be totally 
different bugs.  The symptoms that Weldon S Godfrey has show the number of 
"mbuf clusters in use" rising to the point at which the limit is reached, 
whereas the thread on -stable where BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT is recommended has 
the symptom of "requests for 9k jumbo clusters denied" increasing and the 
mbuf clusters not being anywhere near to the maximum.

So, I think there may be some confusion here.

Gavin



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