Re: FreeBSD 8.0 - network stack crashes?

Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Nov 2009, Tom Judge wrote:
>> Tom Judge wrote:
>>> Weldon S Godfrey 3 wrote:
>>>> we are using onboard NICs on the Dell using the bce driver.  We did 
>>>> try several times to see if using an intel PCIexpress card using the 
>>>> em driver, and we had the same symptoms.
>>>>
>>>> Could the bce driver have the same leak?
>>>
>>> The bce driver does not have a memory leak, it does however have a 
>>> bug which causes memory fragmentation leading to denied mbuf allocation.
>>>
>>> There is a work around for this in current, you can get the patch 
>>> like this:
>>>
>>> http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/head/
>>>
>> That should be:
>>
>> svn diff -r 198319:198320 http://svn.freebsd.org/base/head
>>
>>> You need to put
>>>
>>> options        BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT
>>>
>>> In your kernel to enable the work arround.
> 
> Unless I'm missing something, these seem like they may be totally 
> different bugs.  The symptoms that Weldon S Godfrey has show the number 
> of "mbuf clusters in use" rising to the point at which the limit is 
> reached, whereas the thread on -stable where BCE_JUMBO_HDRSPLIT is 
> recommended has the symptom of "requests for 9k jumbo clusters denied" 
> increasing and the mbuf clusters not being anywhere near to the maximum.
> 
> So, I think there may be some confusion here.

Jumbo frames are not in use what what I have read in the thread however 
there are denied requests for mbuf+clusters, so this could be the issue 
in the bce driver with standrad size frames.

See:
0/201276/90662 requests for mbufs denied (mbufs/clusters/mbuf+clusters)


I guess that there are 2 issues at work here, adding the bce patch 
should not cause any problems but may resolve the issue when using the 
bce driver.

Is it not worth a try?

Tom