BCM5720 Status

I've updated WIP driver again(URL is the same). With the generous help from Emulab, I was able to narrow down root cause of the issue on remote server and finally fixed the instability issue on Dell R820. So it's highly recommended to try WIP driver if bge(4) still does not work on your box.
 
For anyone interested and for the sake of clarity i have just received an email from yongari@ that it was committed to HEAD and will not make it to FreeBSD 9.1 (but will appear on 9-Stable)

==============================================

No, it was just committed to HEAD. I'll merge the change to both
stable/9 and stable/8 after settlement but it wouldn't make it in
9.1(it's too late). Probably you can update to stable/9 to use the
controller after the merge.
 
I am currently going through some testing of a Dell R420 server with a BCM 5720. We have FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE installed on the system and we are getting:

Code: 
bge0: link state changed to UP
bge0: link state changed to DOWN

about 1000 times during boot and periodically throughout the day.

We have tried a few suggestions to resolve this issue, like setting:

Code: 
hw.bge.allow_asf="0"
hw.pci.enable_msi="0"
hw.pci.enable_msix="0"

in the loader.conf but we are still having no luck.

Any ideas?
 
ads said:
Any ideas?
Click to expand...
Not an idea, but possibly pointing in the right direction: Does this server have an iDRAC that shares the Ethernet connector with the normal operating system network functions? Those are often implemented with oddball methods which the FreeBSD driver(s) may not handle. If the iDRAC thinks it needs to reset the network interface, it will do that regardless of the effect it has on the running system.

Many Dell PowerEdge systems have a pair of network ports on the mainboard. If your system has an em1 device, can you move the network cable (and your rc.conf settings) over to it and see if the problem persists? That would help pin it down to either a problem with the integrated management or a problem that affects all ports on that system.
 
The server doesn't have a em1 device.

I have decided to use the Intel I350 instead and this is fully supported.
 
Would be great to have some update regarding this as we are considering to switch on PowerEdge T320, mainly if in case of sharing network interface with iDRAC is causing issues or not and mainly if switching to secondary NIC (eg. not used in parallel as loadbalancer) helps (or even dedicated in case of iDRAC Enterprise). If I understood correctly, in case of iDRAC Express licence you can't choose dedicated NIC even if installed. Thank you.
 
sharkys said:
Would be great to have some update regarding this as we are considering to switch on PowerEdge T320, mainly if in case of sharing network interface with iDRAC is causing issues or not and mainly if switching to secondary NIC (eg. not used in parallel as loadbalancer) helps (or even dedicated in case of iDRAC Enterprise).
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, the prior poster hasn't visited here since their post on 27 February. So we don't know if it was a hardware problem on their specific system or a general problem. On the other hand, you can see from this thread that @yongari@ can fix issues if there is access to a system for testing.

If I understood correctly, in case of iDRAC Express licence you can't choose dedicated NIC even if installed. Thank you.
Click to expand...
I believe you are correct.
 
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sharkys said:
Would be great to have some update regarding this as we are considering to switch on PowerEdge T320, mainly if in case of sharing network interface with iDRAC is causing issues or not and mainly if switching to secondary NIC (eg. not used in parallel as loadbalancer) helps (or even dedicated in case of iDRAC Enterprise). If I understood correctly, in case of iDRAC Express licence you can't choose dedicated NIC even if installed. Thank you.
Click to expand...

Hi @sharky,

We unfortunately could not resolve this issue. We instead installed the Intel i350 onto the machines to get the networking running as Intel support FreeBSD officially.
 
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I was trying to contact @yongari@ to eventually give him access for testing when the server will be available (and if the issue will appear). However, according to the logs, he hasn't logged in since 12/2012 ;-(
 
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This is a user to user forum for most part. The correct way to contact the developers is to post on a mailing list, freebsd-net in this case. You can try to send email directly to @yongari@, the email address should be yongari@freebsd.org. Posting to the mailing list first is preferred though, you could draw the attention of another developer who can also help you if @yongari@ is too busy.
 
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So it's really strange. Despite of running iDRAC on dedicated port on DELL PowerEgde T320, seems that connected interface is "fluctuating" stating following right after boot hundreds of time:

Code: 
bge0: link state changed to UP
bge0: link state changed to DOWN

...but not always. It occurred now after running system two days, after lockup (yes...) and reboot it starts flooding console and I wasn't able to connect, after another restart it is now running fine.

Additional interesting observation - fluctuation occurred after hard reset, but didn't occur after soft reset.

Also I added following in to the loader.conf as stated by @@ads and this seems to be working for me - so far no fluctuation. :)

Code: 
hw.bge.allow_asf="0"
hw.pci.enable_msi="0"
hw.pci.enable_msix="0"
 
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