Realtek re(4) driver

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 12:51:09PM +0200, Alex Dupre wrote:
> David Wolfskill wrote:
> >> 	I use a diskless workstation. With re driver provided by FreeBSD kernel
> >> (9/10/11.x), system randomly crashed because ethernet driver stalls (and
> >> datarate is always less than 300mbps). With official realtek driver
> >> (v194.01), system now runs as expected (with datarate up to 1 Gbps).
> 
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=166724
> 
> Anyone interested in taking the bounty or contributing to it? Perhaps
> the FreeBSD Foundation should jump in?

A starting point would be:
(1) what hardware offload features are enabled
(2) whether a specific direction is the problem
(3) correlate traffic on both ends, i.e. what packets are dropped "on
the wire"

The most likely cause of any problem here is a missing workaround for a
hardware bug or Realtek deciding that some specific tuning is necessary
for certain chips. It is nearly impossible to fix this kind of bugs
without having access to the hardware and a way to reproduce it.
Comparing with a working driver might be possible, but it is extremely
tideous.

Joerg