Bce ethernet driver & kernel crash / panic

rdr

Hi,

I experience a kernel crash which seems to be related to the bce ethernet driver.

Before, the crash, I used without any problem 2 pfsense firewalls (pfSense 2.0.2 running on Dell PowerEdge 1950) along with CARP in a production environment with 3 NICs on each firewall (bce0, bce1 and bge0). The problem below is the same for both firewalls.
Then I plugged a new dual ethernet ports NIC in one of the firewalls.
After the firewall booted up and before I assigned the new interfaces, the previously existing interfaces became bce0 and bce3, and the new interfaces appeared as bce1 and bce2.
So I reassigned the previouly existing interfaces in order to use bce0 and bce1.
Then, I assigned opt2 to bce1 without any problems.
Then, I configured the opt2 interface (enabled, static, IP address and netmask, without any gateway). At this point, a few seconds after I save the new settings, the firewall reboots.

Please find attached the crash report of one of the firewalls.

Does anyone have any idea related to the way of fixing this issue ?

Regards,

PS for administrators : could you please unlock the following topics so I can update them ?
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,48453.msg258362.html#msg258362
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,48069.msg253351.html#msg253351
crash.txt

rdr

Sorry I made a mistake : I meant "So I reassigned the previouly existing interfaces in order to use bce0 and bce3."

wallabybob

I suggest you try a firmware upgrade to a pfSense 2.1 snapshot build. The 2.1 builds are based of FreeBSD 8.3 which has much more up to date device drivers than FreeBSD 8.1 used in the 2.0.x series of releases.

The devices you added are BCM5709 PCI Express devices. The original devices are BCM5708 PCI-X devices. They are different devices even though they use the same device driver.

I expect you will have to remove the new devices to update the firmware.

stephenw10

Multiple Broadcom NICs in a Dell server, try this:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#Broadcom_bce.284.29_Cards

Steve

rdr

Thanks for your answers.

@stephenw10 : I'll try the changes in the /boot/loader.conf.local file next week. Since the firewalls are in a production environement I Previously have to communicate about the service downtime etc. I'll let you know.

@wallabybob : Since the firewalls are in a production environement, I prefer to use the 2.0.2 version, which is officially the stable one.

If the /boot/loader.conf.local changes don't resolve the issue and if i don't find any other configurations changes to try, then I'll ask my firm to buy dual port ethernet NICs with Intel, SIS or Realtek chipsets.

cmb

I unlocked your old threads.

Definitely the first thing to try is what Steve linked. If that doesn't work, don't get SIS or Realtek NICs, those are more desktop-grade hardware. Intel and Broadcom are generally the best.

rdr

Thanks for unlocking, I updated these old topics.

rdr

Multiple Broadcom NICs in a Dell server, try this:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tuning_and_Troubleshooting_Network_Cards#Broadcom_bce.284.29_Cards

Steve

This solved my problem. Maybe I should have googled a little bit more :-\

Thanks guys for your help