FreeBSD nfe driver for NVIDIA nForce network adapter

[Nathan Whitehorn]

Andre Boehm wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I tried if_nfe on my ASUS A8N-E with nForce4 chipset.
> FreeBSD-6.1-RELEASE/amd64, because of problems with if_nve.
> At first, everything seems to look fine from looking at dmesg and
> ifconfig, but then no traffic seems to come in or goes out.
>
> When I switched back by unloading if_nfe and loading if_nve, starting
> /etc/netstart, I received an email notice by arpwatch (on my office
> router) that the MAC address of my NIC had changed, showing the digits
> in reverse order.
I'm experiencing the same problem on a Sunfire X2100 (also nForce 4),
except that receive works reliably (I also get the MAC reversal).
Transmit, however, rapidly starts to fail, resulting in a kernel panic
on a fast link. I suspect an mbuf leak, as the performance is fine for a
while (a couple seconds), then starts falling off quickly to a low,
stable value (0 for 100 Mbit, ~80 kb/s for 10 Mbit).
-Nathan