Re: nfe problem on 8.0-BETA2

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Ryan
Rogers<webmaster_at_doghouserepair.com> wrote:
> I'm running 8.0-BETA2/amd64 on a system that has on-board ethernet.  It is
> detected by FreeBSD as the following:
>
> nfe0: <NVIDIA nForce MCP55 Networking Adapter> port 0xac00-0xac07 mem
> 0xcfffa000-0xcfffafff,0xcfff9000-0xcfff90ff,0xcfff8000-0xcfff800f irq 22 at
> device 17.0 on pci0
> miibus1: <MII bus> on nfe0
> e1000phy0: <Marvell 88E1116 Gigabit PHY> PHY 1 on miibus1
> e1000phy0:  10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, 1000baseT,
> 1000baseT-FDX, auto
>
> The problem is, I can't get packets to move across the interface.  I know
> that the interface works in Windows as well as Ubuntu, but it looks like
> it's failing to get fully configured in FreeBSD.  The output of ifconfig
> nfe0 is:
>
> nfe0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
>        options=19b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
>        ether 00:04:4b:01:8c:0b
>        inet 10.10.10.3 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.10.10.255
>        media: Ethernet autoselect (none)
>        status: active
>
> The part that I find odd is "media: Ethernet autoselect (none)".  If I
> manually force it to "media 1000baseT mediaopt full-duplex", that line
> becomes "media: 1000baseT full-duplex (10baseT/UTP half-duplex)". Still, the
> interface is dead.
>
> I found PR kern/127910 which describes the same problem, except for
> 7.0-RELEASE.  There's been no activity on that for 9 months though (aside
> from my update today).  Can anyone offer me any insight on this?
>
> Thanks,
> Ryan


I can confirm this is a nfe problem, I first reported it to the
mailing list a few weeks back
under the subject FreeBSD 8 BETA1 DHCP trouble.
http://groups.google.co.jp/group/muc.lists.freebsd.current/browse_thread/thread/ba7b35e561d3e868
I have several different motherboards with nfe nics, My findings are as follows.

on a FreeBSD -CURRENT snapshot dated 6-1-2009 dhcp works as expected.
somewhere after ~ 6-6-2009 something broke.

dhclient nfe0
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
DHCPDISCOVER on nfe0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

the odd thing is that on motherboards that have dual nfe nics nfe1
always works,and nfe0 is always broke.
on motherboards that have only a single nfe interface nfe0 is indeed broke.

on a dual nic motherboard, if you go into BIOS and disable one of the
LAN devices. DHCP will fail if the interface name is nfe0
even though it worked 5 min before when that same nic and MAC address
had the nfe1 name.

This entire thing is odd :)


Sam Fourman Jr.