Pfsense 1.2.3rc2 will crash with fabiatech FX5621 agere cards

aseques

I've fighting a lot with pfsense to see if I could get a decent troughtput/stability.
As I told another post http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,16096.msg87533.html#msg87533, the driver come straight from dragonflay but in freebsd has been stuck at the first version.

It seems that in pfsense/freebsd you cannot use NEVER both NICs at the same time (at least with 1.2.3rc2 or earlier), and you have to stuck to a single one.
If that's not enough, when you are using a single interface (et1) and start the iperf server , at the same moment the traffic starts, the whole system crashes with the message "et1: WARNING!! ring 1, buf_idx0, rr_idx 373"

So, if you wanted to bought something like the FX5621, think it twice.

NOTE: I have no experience on the other devices from fabiatech (FX5620/FX5622), but reading from the forums, doesn't seem to be affected for this problem.

bellera

Hello!

FX5621 it doesn't work for me.

I tried different versions. The last one was the yesterday's embedded snapshot (June, 16 2009):

http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_RELENG_7_2/pfSense_RELENG_1_2/embedded/

I can't comunicate with LAN. I tried LAN at et0 and rl0. Same problem.

WAN at rl0 or rl1 works fine. I can ping to the Internet from serial console.

Sometimes I have this message:

et0: watchdog timed out

Any ideas?

Regards,

Josep Pujadas

aseques

If you disable et0 and use only et1 and the other four interfaces, pfsense will work "normally", I wouldn't push much traffic tough.
In any case I decided not to use pfsense for this board anymore. Obviously it's not pfsense fault, but the driver quality is not enough for a production system.
The problem with this cards is that the driver for linux is in the same situation, stuck in stagged drivers (inestable branch), so this embedded that should be a good investment is quite useless :(
If the driver improves, I might give a second chance to this fabiatech boards…

bluethumb

I have one device too(with same problems), and can tell you that the problem is the same on openbsd etc. if I use nic et0 & et1 But I do have a cdrom, form Fabiatech, with source code for linux so if some can point me in the right way to whom could upgrade the drivers. Maybe that will help !?

aseques

If you have some firmware upgrade, it might help, but when I was inspecting on the cd I had, the firmware version on the CD was the same the I already had installed, so no improvement for me.
Can you post what firmware version do you have?
Also, if you have the skill to look and understand drivers, the newest changes to this driver I could find where in dragonfly, I posted the link in their git branch http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/history/2eb0d0694bd74032ad456be1c83b669b6b692b18:/sys/dev/netif/et/if_et.c in a previous message http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,16096.msg87533.html#msg87533

Also, what is this source code for linux, is the same driver that you can find in the kernel?

bluethumb

the source on the cdrom is ver. 1.2.2 :
#define DRIVER_VERSION_STRING "1.2.2"
#define DRIVER_VENDOR "Agere Systems, http://www.agere.com"
#define DRIVER_BUILD_DATE "01/31/2006 15:40:00"
#define DRIVER_DESC "10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet Driver"
–
The vertion in linux -kernel is from this project :
http://dadams1969.googlepages.com/et131xkernelmodule

So you see the main code base is from 2006/5 !! (what is my cdrom)
that would not help any ::)