Odd network issues on ZFS based NFS server

[Anders Nordby]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 08:18:09PM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>> Given that you stated FreeBSD8.1-Prerelease I think you should have the
>> patch, but please make sure that your sys/nfsserver/nfs_srvsubs.c is
>> at least r206406.

I didn't have any time to dump and look at the network traffic much yet
(life is busy). But, the issue in this thread also happens/happened in
FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE, so I don't see how it's a recent change that makes
this happen. Last night I had some progress, by switching to an old 100
Mbps USB NIC of mine (nerds sure do have lots of handy things at home
eh) I got rid of the packet loss:

Jun 11 01:25:14 unixfile kernel: rue0: <USBKR100 USB 10/100 LAN, class
0/0, rev 
1.10/1.00, addr 2> on usbus3
Jun 11 01:25:14 unixfile kernel: miibus2: <MII bus> on rue0
Jun 11 01:25:14 unixfile kernel: ruephy0: <RealTek RTL8150 internal
media interf
ace> PHY 0 on miibus2

Performance is quite lousy however. Just in case I am trying to get hold
of a PCI-X Intel NIC to see how that goes, as this is a production
server after all (or supposed to be).

> With regards to possible bge(4) issues, Yong-Hyeon works on this driver
> fairly often.  If it turns out to be a driver issue of some sort, he can
> probably help.  Relevant commits are here (to give you some idea of
> activity):
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/bge/if_bge.c
> 
> One commit caught my eye (rev 1.226.2.15), but that seems to be more
> focused on mbuf issues (your system doesn't appear to be having any,
> given your netstat -m output).
> 
> CC'ing Yong-Hyeong, as he might know of some edge case where bge(4)
> could go crazy with interrupts.  :-)  Yong-Hyeon, the entire thread is
> here:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-June/008654.html

Let me know if there's anything bge related I can try/test. It might
take a day or two or more. Customer is sort of getting annoyed by these
problems, so the room for testing is getting smaller. But of course I
want to help get a fix for this.

Regards,

-- 
Anders.