axe USB driver freezing after some traffic

Thanks for your reply.

I took the if_axe.c and if_axereg.h from RELENG_8 and recompiled my kernel. I've been doing some testing for about four hours and it looks to be rock solid.
 
if_axe driver problems

Hi all,

I'm trying to use a Linksys USB200M USB wired network adapter. This USB network adapter also uses the axe(4) driver, from what I can tell. I'm trying to install and use FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE i386 on an admittedly old laptop. It's a Toshiba Satellite 2105CDS, it has an AMD K6-2 processor at 400MHz, 160MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I had a 100GB hard drive in there but after installing FreeBSD 9 and trying to go back to FreeBSD 8, the FreeBSD 8 installer can't partition the hard drive (even though Windows still can), but that's a topic for another forum post.

Anyway I know the laptop is slow and old but I'm not expecting the world out of it. After the FreeBSD 8 install DHCP from my router to the USB200M takes forever, and once it finally gets an IP address pings to my router (192.168.1.1) take upwards of 3000 ms (3 seconds) to reply.

I tried FreeBSD 7 and the axe(4) driver there works for a few minutes and dies out with watchdog errors. FreeBSD 9 has the same problem as FreeBSD 8. I found this thread and took the advice to update if_axe.c and if_axereg.h files to HEAD in the kernel source directory and try to rebuild the kernel, which is very painful on that old laptop, and once it finally made it to if_axe.c, I get a compiler error about PHY_RESET being used without being declared.

I found a #define for PHY_RESET in /usr/src/sys/dev/mii/miivar.h. Can I just add a #include for this file to fix the compiler error, or will that just open another can of worms?

Any help is appreciated. Sorry to resurrect the thread yet again.
 
Still Not Working

So adding that #include didn't change anything, but changing PHY_RESET to mii_phy_reset did fix the compiler error. It didn't seem to matter though because after hours of compiling the kernel and installing it, the driver still doesn't perform any better. Pings to my router (192.168.1.1) still take upwards of 3000ms (3 seconds). I don't know what else to try. If anyone has any ideas, please reply.
 
Post #26 says it's in recent 8-stable. That would be long after 8.1 came out. If you don't want to upgrade, the snapshot of 9-current on the FTP site can run as a live CD for testing.
 
I installed 8.0 this morning and the axe driver seems to be working much better. What I was saying in my above posts is 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0 all have the same slow problem and 7.4 has watchdog failures. I just decided I'd start trying versions older and older until one worked. 8.0 works, but now pkg_add fails. I think the reason is because 8.0 is old enough that the binaries aren't on the ftp server pkg_add wants to use. Just as a quick try I ran pkg_add -r nano and I get:

Code:
Error: Unable to get [url]ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.0-release/Latest/nano.tbz:[/url] File unavailable (e.g., file not found, no access)
pkg_add: unable to fetch 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-8.0-release/Latest/nano.tbz' by URL
pkg_add: 1 package addition(s) failed

And sure enough manual ftp to ftp.freebsd.org shows that packages-8.0-RELEASE doesn't exist in FreeBSD/ports/i386. I found an environment variable to change, PACKAGEROOT I think, but that didn't help. Any futher suggestions?
 
Fixed:

setenv PACKAGESITE 'ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.0-release/Latest/'

Thanks for the help.
 
Back
Top