Re: bizarre nfe(4) problem

From: Pyun YongHyeon <pyunyh_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 18:22:22 +0900
On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 10:42:19PM -0700, Don Lewis wrote:
 > I've a rather strange nfe(4) problem that appears to be repeatable.  I
 > recently started running -CURRENT on a older socket 754 motherboard with
 > the nForce3 chipset.  Initially, I was running an SMP kernel, but I had
 > problems with sporadic "nfe0: watchdog timeout (missed Tx interrupts) --
 > recovering" problems that would intermittently cause the system to lose
 > network connectivity which it would recover from.  The kernel was very
 > similar to GENERIC, with just the addition of "options DEBUG_VFS_LOCKS"
 > and the replacement of atapicd with atapicam.
 > 
 > The nfe0 problem totally went away when I removed "options SMP" and
 > "device apic" from the kernel configuration, except under the following
 > very specific circumstances:
 > 
 > 	A vncserver session using the GNOME desktop was started on the
 > 	system.
 > 	
 > 	There was no keyboard or mouse activity on the console for an
 > 	extended period of time, allowing the GNOME screen saver to kick
 > 	in and lock the screen.
 > 
 > The system would run fine in this state for many hours, and would accept
 > incoming SMTP connections, etc.
 > 
 > 	A remote vncclient makes a connection to the vncserver session
 > 	and the password was entired on the client.
 > 
 > At this point the nfe0 interface would appear to go deaf.  This might
 > happen before or slightly after the password dialog box appeared for the
 > vnc session.  For a short while, the system would be able to transmit
 > TCP packets, ntp queries, etc., but it would not respond to any incoming
 > packets (ping, TCP connection requests, etc.). Eventually, the ARP cache
 > would time out and the only packets being transmitted would be ARP
 > requests and the occasional UDP broadcast from the samba server running
 > on the machine.
 > 
 > Pressing any key on the (PS/2) keyboard would instantly bring the
 > network interface back to life.  Examination of /var/log/messages showed
 > lots of "nfe0: watchdog timeout" messages for the entire time that nfe0
 > was not listening to the network.
 > 
 > I've had this problem happen twice.  Both times were after an extended
 > period of console inactivity.   An incoming vnc connection is not
 > sufficient to trigger the problem if the console was recently active,
 > and even waiting for the GNOME screensaver to put the monitor in DPMS
 > power save mode before initiating the vnc connection does not appear to
 > be sufficient to trigger the problem.
 > 
 > I believe that nfe0 was sharing an interrupt with one of the USB ports
 > when the kernel was compiled with "device apic", but it is not sharing
 > an interrupt without "device apic".
 > 
 > Any thoughts on how to debug this problem?
 > 
 > 
 > # vmstat -i
 > interrupt                          total       rate
 > irq0: clk                       41903449       1000
 > irq1: atkbd0                       39034          0
 > irq3: ohci0                            5          0
 > irq7: ppc0                             2          0
 > irq8: rtc                        5362802        127
 > irq9: ohci1 ahc0+                1963559         46
 > irq10: nfe0+                      225593          5
              ^^
You have nfe0+ which indicates vmstat had run out of room to
display somthing. I'm not sure but it's still sharing interrupt
with other device?

 > irq11: drm0                      2511908         59
 > irq12: psm0                       332931          7
 > irq14: ata0                           48          0
 > Total                           52339331       1249
 > 

-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon
Received on Sat Aug 11 2007 - 07:22:49 UTC

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