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Date:      Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:28:00 +0000
From:      Tom Judge <tom@tomjudge.com>
To:        Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk>
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:  <4AF0AE70.7030004@tomjudge.com>
In-Reply-To: <20091103221739.E75071@ury.york.ac.uk>
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> <20091103221739.E75071@ury.york.ac.uk>

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Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> 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.

Jumbo frames are not in use what what I have read in the thread however 
there are denied requests for mbuf+clusters, so this could be the issue 
in the bce driver with standrad size frames.

See:
0/201276/90662 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)


I guess that there are 2 issues at work here, adding the bce patch 
should not cause any problems but may resolve the issue when using the 
bce driver.

Is it not worth a try?

Tom





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