[Fixed] Crash due to receiving jumbo frames with Applianceshop.eu Dual GHz

tim.mcmanus

I would honestly return the boxes if you still can. You've hit a hardware limitation of the chipset (most likely because of binaries that were/were not supplied to the FreeBSD dev team). There are many good discussions on this board about RealTek chips as well as other vendors' chips. There may be a workaround, and possibly 2.1 might address this limitation, but I'm not entirely sure about that.

Another reason to return the hardware is that it's very expensive and you can probably do a much better job building a box from individual parts. I built a 2U pfSense box with 4 xGbit NICs,, and i3, and 4GB of RAM for US$400. I got to choose my hardware and didn't have to worry too much about supportability.

But I think you have a legitimate grievance with the hardware reseller because they should have disclosed the limitations of their hardware running pfSense. As you found out, it's clearly documented by the FreeBSD folks.

cmb

This is a good example of why we're going to launch a certified hardware program soon. "Tested to work" means different things to different people depending on who's doing the testing and what they're testing exactly. Our testing regimen would have caught that, where we'd be able to put a note on the test results that it doesn't support jumbo frames, and maybe do something beyond that.

I would get in touch with applianceshop and see what suggestions they have. You may have to return the hardware, it sounds like it's a hardware limitation that it's not going to do what you need it to do. But I wouldn't discourage anyone from buying from applianceshop.eu, they're one of the biggest supporters of the project, and in general their hardware is better tested than most anyone else's out there.

The problem isn't anything they're doing, it's that no one out there does a truly comprehensive test at this point in time. We'll soon be doing that ourselves, in our office, with standardized testing procedures that include a wide range of things that have problems from time to time whether in the hardware itself or in drivers. We hope to get a high adoption rate from our resellers, since it'll avoid circumstances such as this that happen from time to time.

But note - you're far, far more likely to have problems with random hardware you bought from somewhere else, or building your own box from parts, than you are with one of our recommended hardware vendors. Even if all the pieces are supported, they may not work well in combination, amongst other potential complications.

TNX

I do know very well the grievances of testing hardware that you assembled yourself. I really wanted to avoid doing that when I authorized the purchase of these units. Overall it seems that trying to use pretested or brand equipment just causes you to be debugging even odder problems.

I don’t think Applianceshop is any worse than the big players out there (Dell, HP, Cisco etc). All of them are selling products and listing “what we can’t do” isn’t a big seller. In fact previous issue with the setup we are doing was due to known Broadcom teaming bug in Dell hardware.

Then again it would really be nice if they would mention the network adapters used in their hardware. Now there’s no mention about it in the sales pages (except for models where they use Intel cards). In networking appliance the manufacturer/model can be a big decision maker. I went in to the classic “assume they put in good hardware” –thinking and didn’t do my groundwork before ordering. Even if I knew there was a Realtek card in there, I wouldn’t have guessed you can crash the hardware by sending jumbo frames, I would just have assumed the card would silently drop them.

We’ll be in contact with Applianceshop.eu too. But I did want to give a heads up so that someone searching the forums for info might have bit more preparation info when selecting hardware. In conclusion: the hardware is solid, as long as there are 0 chances of full jumbo frames arriving at any port.

jschellevis

REALTEK JUMBO FRAME - ISSUE SOLVED

Dear TNX, and anyone seeking a solution for the Realtek jumbo frame issue.

Although we have not been contacted by TNX or anyone else about this issue we did notice it on the forum just a week ago.
Since then we have been investigating if the issue is hardware or software related.

As Realtek states the RTL8111D(L) does support jumbo frames up to 9K, we quickly concluded that the issue must be related to the drivers.
To verify if the issue does indeed appears on the first jumbo-frame we setup a test system with a plain pfSense and a mac book pro..
And indeed… on the first jumbo frame (size did not matter, everything larger than 1500) the appliance crashed.

So now we had a reproduceable situation and we started to search for a solution..
First we tried a later version of FreeBSD (9.1), this version did allow us to set jumbo frames and did not crash on receiving them.

To shorten the rest of the story.. we have recompiled the kernel to include the new Realtek driver (from their website) and that solved the issue completely.

To install:

Dowload from http://www.deciso.com/downloads/opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz
unpack the file and copy to /boot/kernel/ (filename should be kernel)

Best regards,

Jos Schellevis
Deciso B.V.

terraltech

@jschellevis:

REALTEK JUMBO FRAME - ISSUE SOLVED

Dear TNX, and anyone seeking a solution for the Realtek jumbo frame issue.

Although we have not been contacted by TNX or anyone else about this issue we did notice it on the forum just a week ago.
Since then we have been investigating if the issue is hardware or software related.

As Realtek states the RTL8111D(L) does support jumbo frames up to 9K, we quickly concluded that the issue must be related to the drivers.
To verify if the issue does indeed appears on the first jumbo-frame we setup a test system with a plain pfSense and a mac book pro..
And indeed… on the first jumbo frame (size did not matter, everything larger than 1500) the appliance crashed.

So now we had a reproduceable situation and we started to search for a solution..
First we tried a later version of FreeBSD (9.1), this version did allow us to set jumbo frames and did not crash on receiving them.

To shorten the rest of the story.. we have recompiled the kernel to include the new Realtek driver (from their website) and that solved the issue completely.

To install:

Dowload from http://www.deciso.com/downloads/opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz

unpack the file and copy to /boot/kernel/ (filename should be kernel)

Best regards,

Jos Schellevis
Deciso B.V.

I am having a similar issue with my pfsense version 2.0.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p13, Platform nanobsd (4g) on a OPNsense 5 port Ghz rack edition - 19" pfSense appliance

After downloading the file, am unable to extract it, do you know why?

wget http://www.deciso.com/downloads/opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz

tar -zxvf opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz

tar: Unrecognized archive format
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

Thank you. 8)

asterix

€1,099 for that Atom junk…. ouch !!

you can make 3 (maybe 4 if you know where to shop) systems of that config for €1,099

stephenw10

I'm seeing the archive as corrupt also. :(

Steve

jimp

It should just be kernel.gz, not .tgz. The file as-is is simple gzip compressed, no tar, which is why tar doesn't like it. So either they have uploaded the wrong archive, or you should just move that to /boot/kernel/kernel.gz (don't decompress it)

You may want to make sure you have a good backup first, and/or:

cp -Rp /kernel /kernel.old

That way you have a copy of the other kernel on hand to boot if that one fails.


# file opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz 
opnsense-ghz-realtek-kernel.tgz: gzip compressed data, was "kernel", from Unix, last modified: Wed Jun 12 10:56:20 2013

stephenw10

Doh! Should have tried that. ::)

If this is just an alternative re(4) driver can it not be loaded as a kernel module instead? That would surely be easier.

Steve

Tillebeck

Did this in shell after uploading kernel.gz to /tmp using upload function in Diagnostics -> Command Promt

mount –rw /
cp -Rp /boot/kernel /boot/kernel.old
rm -rf /boot/kernel/*
mv /tmp/kernel.gz /boot/kernel/kernel.gz
chmod +x /boot/kernel/kernel.gz
mount –w /
shutdown -h now

After boot pfsense comes online just fine. After login in shell there is still just the kernel.gz in /boot/kernel/ and it has not been unpacked. But it still boots just fine?

Edit: Also tried the above without deleting files in /boot/kernel/ but just renaming old kernel.gz and copying new kernel.gz into the /boot/kernel/ folder. After boot files sill have same data in /boot/kernel/ so I guess the kernel.gz did not unpack this way either

Tillebeck

Wrong to delete all files in boot/kernel.

But does not matter. Problem should be solved in the new 2.1 release. Upgrade or reinstall to fix issue. Probably a better solution.