Watchdog timeouts and dead network on bge - 6.1-RC1

[Lars Erik Gullerud]

We recently upgraded one of our 4.11 servers to 6.1-RC1. The server is a 
Dell PE2650, dual Xeons, and has two onboard Broadcom BCM5701 cards, using 
the bge driver.

Some older threads on -net and -current led me to believe that most issues 
with bge driver in FreeBSD >4 had been sorted. However, after our upgrade, 
we are seing errors like this:

Apr 22 18:44:01 nebula kernel: bge0: watchdog timeout -- resetting
Apr 22 18:44:01 nebula kernel: bge0: link state changed to DOWN
Apr 22 18:44:03 nebula kernel: bge0: link state changed to UP

...and more importantly - when this happens, the network connection does 
NOT in fact come back up. Logging into the box locally (or via a different 
network interface) and manually issuing "ifconfig bge0 down ; ifconfig 
bge0 up" DOES get the interface going again, however.

We have only seen this on very high network loads - the particular message 
included above occured while transferring some 120GB of data from a 4.11 
NFS-server to this 6.1-RC1 box.

Is this a known issue in bge? If so, is anyone working on it? Can we 
provide some useful information to whoever this might be?

We have never had any issues with bge in 4.x, but we really need to get 
this server up to 5.x/6.x at this point in time, any other suggestions on 
knobs or workarounds that can give us bge stability?

Thanks in advance,

/leg