NIC keeps locking up

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Jacco Hoeve

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May 11, 2012
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I recently made the move to FreeNas. I am currently on version 8.2 beta3 because of the plugin system. I have however just one issue. My network keeps locking up. The remedy when it happens to do a ifconfig down & up.

After an evening of debugging I found its probably related to large network packets. I disabled txcsum and rxcsum and tso. It still kept locking up. In the end I put the NFS client on different settings. I lowered the rsize and wsize. Now NFS is nice and slow but atleast my NIC isnt crashing.

I have this card:

[root@StorageNode] ~# dmesg | grep re0
re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port 0xd000-0xd0ff mem 0xd0004000-0xd0004fff,0xd0000000-0xd0003fff irq 17 at device 0.0 on pci4
re0: Using 1 MSI-X message
re0: Chip rev. 0x2c000000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00000000
miibus0: <MII bus> on re0
re0: Ethernet address: c8:60:00:86:01:3f
re0: [ITHREAD]
re0: link state changed to DOWN
re0: link state changed to UP

Is there anything I can do?
 

Jacco Hoeve

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Some extra info: re0@pci0:4:0:0: class=0x020000 card=0x84321043 chip=0x816810ec rev=0x06 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'Realtek Semiconductor'
device = 'Gigabit Ethernet NIC(NDIS 6.0) (RTL8168/8111/8111c)'
class = network
subclass = ethernet

~# ifconfig
re0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
options=3898<VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,WOL_UCAST,WOL_MCAST,WOL_MAGIC>
ether c8:60:00:86:01:3f
inet 10.0.1.16 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.1.255
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
 

paleoN

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Apr 22, 2012
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What's the rest of your hardware look like? If you look at this [thread=7006]thread[/thread] they have a similar sounding issue, but with an intel nic. I'm not sure what version he is running though. If your up for it you could try to use a newer driver for your chipset if one is available.
 

Jacco Hoeve

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Im a senior linux engineer.. I think I would try a driver if I knew which one and where to find it. I'll check your link out as well. I'm new to BSD though.
 

ProtoSD

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I think there are some general problems with the Realtek NIC and the general consensus is to just disable it and use an Intel NIC. The drivers are compiled into the kernel, so it's not simple to just use another one. Usually the developers try to keep the drivers updated.
 

Jacco Hoeve

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Darn.. if only I knew that beforehand :).

Anyway. A different NIC is only possible over USB. Is that an option with FreeNAS? Cause the board has only one slot (pci-e x16) and its in use :).
 

Jacco Hoeve

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I'm afraid the problem wasnt the onboard nic. I replaced it with an Intel 1000ct PCI-e card and that card exhibits the same problems!!
 

Jacco Hoeve

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May 11, 2012
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So I did some more testing. Its easy for me to replicate this issue. All I have to do is set the wsize and rsize to something like 32768 (in the NFS options on the client). I lowered it to 8192 and its running fine now.
 
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