Broadcom bfe driver seriously bugged

k3rmit

I've encountered a serious bug in the bfe drivers which makes the kernel panic and reboot the machines endlessly.
This is apparently a known bug as reported in

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-drivers/2006-December/000302.html

I've already reported it into pfsense CVSTRAC, but meanwhile i'm trying to compile a custom kernel starting from a vanilla FreeBSD 6.1 kernel and applying your patches as well as the one suggested in the link above mentioned.
Could someone please help me in applying the them?
I've found some suggestion here

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,2251.msg13117.html#msg13117

but to no avail since no standard patch command works with your patches and the patches.RELENG_6_1 file, which i suppose i should use to patch the kernel sources.

Furthermore, aren't you identifying by Tags on the CVS repository the patches and the configurations for release versions? I'm downloading the latest for everything but i'm not sure they are the right ones for the 1.0.1 release.

thanks in advance for any help.

Albe

sullrich

Try a recent snapshot which is based on 6.2.

k3rmit

Oh thanks, i will, but do you consider a recent snapshot to be stable enough to be put into a production environment? That's the reason why i wanted to try a patch on 1.0.1 .

Many compliments, marvelous product, btw.

sullrich

Yes, we have made almost no changes to recent snapshots. Only RRD related changes.

hoba

…and some loadbalancer improvements (easier to configure through the gui, less danger of footshooting, support for failover pools).

k3rmit

Thanks again.

I was trying to install and make a bootstrap of a developer edition in a VMware 5.5 virtual machine, but the ftp client crashes the system spectacularly (i'm sorry but i can't paste the stack backtrace at the moment).

Can you please help me in downloading the latest snapshot? I couldn't find any help nor in the wiki neither in the site on how to connect via cvs and checkout or where to find the daily snapshot anyway.

Meanwhile i will try to make the devlopers edition work.

hoba

http://snapshots.pfsense.com/FreeBSD6/RELENG_1/ is constantly building new versions.

k3rmit

Hi!!

Thanks for the link, i did found it anyway shortly afterwards having posted here on the forum, it should be published but blame on me for not having searched thoroughly.

I downloaded the last snapshot and installed it successfully. The good new is that bfe driver works, the bad that it isn't still perfect: here is the log output while bringing up the interface:

bfe0: link state changed to DOWN
bfe0: BUG!  Timeout waiting for bit 00000001 of register 41c to set.
bfe0: link state changed to UP

Now the question is: can i trust this connection?? I will obviously do the necessary tests, but i'm wondering what's the scale of the problem with this driver and how much can i risk on it.

Thanks for the support!!

hoba

Do some stresstests in the desired configuration (including trafficshaping, carp, … whatever you plan to use). Also try searching the freebsd lists for known problems with this driver. Whatever it is is driver related and is not maintained by us.

sullrich

@k3rmit:

Hi!!

Thanks for the link, i did found it anyway shortly afterwards having posted here on the forum, it should be published but blame on me for not having searched thoroughly.

I downloaded the last snapshot and installed it successfully. The good new is that bfe driver works, the bad that it isn't still perfect: here is the log output while bringing up the interface:
bfe0: link state changed to DOWN
bfe0: BUG!  Timeout waiting for bit 00000001 of register 41c to set.
bfe0: link state changed to UP
Now the question is: can i trust this connection?? I will obviously do the necessary tests, but i'm wondering what's the scale of the problem with this driver and how much can i risk on it.

Thanks for the support!!

If you still have issues you may want to post to freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list for assistance.