Re0 watchdog timeout with PowerD enabled

[bsdkllr]

hi,

i have a single realtek nic set up with the wan on a vlan and native lan. if powerd is enabled and i try and do a speedtest it will cause the nic to throw a re0 watchdog time out.

light internet browsing will be fine but any time you start consuming bandwidth it will error out.

thanks

[cmb]

You'll have to duplicate on stock FreeBSD and report to freebsd-net so it can get fixed upstream. That's not anything in our code and we only work on hardware-specific issues that apply to things we sell.

[bsdkllr]

i will do that thank you

[andy]

This may not be 2.3-related, and maybe not even PowerD-related. In 2.2, I had an re0 card that would "watchdog timeout" about once every few days, which caused the connection to drop for about 60 seconds. I don't think that box supported PowerD, but I don't remember for sure. None of the workarounds I found (various kernel options, MII changes, etc) ever completely fixed the problem, and eventually I just gave up and got a new box with Intel NICs. Realtek is simply a lower quality NIC, unfortunately, or possibly the FreeBSD driver isn't very good.

Some related links, you can Google for "freebsd realtek watchdog timeout" for a lot more:

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/1850
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/2014-April/038420.html

[charliem]

@andy:

… I just gave up and got a new box with Intel NICs. Realtek is simply a lower quality NIC,

Try adding a heatsink to the chip.  Several cards came with them early on, until the accountants outnumbered the engineers.  I had several that were unstable w/o a heatsink, but fine with it.

[solo16]

@bsdkllr:

hi,

i have a single realtek nic set up with the wan on a vlan and native lan. if powerd is enabled and i try and do a speedtest it will cause the nic to throw a re0 watchdog time out.

light internet browsing will be fine but any time you start consuming bandwidth it will error out.

thanks

Hi,

I'm pretty sure it's not 2.3 related coz I'm having the same issue, and I'm on stable 2.2.6. My box will eventually "crash / hang" (regardless the load) can't access webconfig and internet etc, has to reboot the box to get access again. Now I've switched off (unchecked) powerd and it's been up and running for more than 30 hours and 0 error / drop.

This is my box (bought off of China):
https://world.taobao.com/item/525567399176.htm?fromSite=main&spm=a312a.7700846.0.0.QWscLQ&_u=21igi6h264bf

Spec:
CPU: i3-4025u 2C - 4T - AES-NI
RAM: 8GB 1.35v DDR3L
LAN: Dual RT8111E
SSD: Msata Plextor 128GB
WAN: 500/500 Fibre to Home

Hopefully, this will be fixed in the future.

Cheers!