'nfe' stalls (analysis and partial solution)

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 06:00:39PM +0200, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> just for the record and the mail archives - i have been experiencing
> a lot of unrecovered stalls of the network card with the 'nfe'
> driver under heavy load (this was on 7.0-i386 and 7.0-amd64, but
> it is hardware related so it cross-platform).
> 
> After 2-3 days of investigation, and with the help of
> Pyun YongHyeon (yongari) i finally managed to pin down the
> problem and start working on a solution.
> 
> I would be grateful if others can report of similar problems
> with the 'nfe' driver so we can see if the patch we can come
> up with also fix their problem.

followup:

a patch to address the problem is available at

	http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/

(current version is
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/nfe-20080426.1044.diff
but it might change with time as we get more details or info
on how to deal with this problem).

	cheers
	luigi