Juniper e3k with ports limitied to 100Mbit and re NICs on MSI MoBo: problems with duplex negotiation (Hetzner host provider discard FreeBSD support due this bug)

[Bjoern A. Zeeb]

On Tue, 11 Jan 2011, Pyun YongHyeon wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:47:29PM +0300, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
>>
>>  media: Ethernet 100baseTX <full-duplex> (100baseTX <half-duplex>)
>
> I can see what's going on here. Link partner used forced media
> configuration, probably 100baseTX/full-duplex, and re(4)'s
> resolved link is 100baseTX/half-duplex.

I can confirm that the switch port should be (manually) set to 100/FD.
It's documented on their support wiki (in German).


> rgephy(4) currently always use auto-negotiation to work-around link
> establishment issues reported in past. I don't know how Linux
> managed to address link establishment issues for
> non-autonegotiation case though. Perhaps a lot of vendor supplied

As I read your reply, there had been a time when manually setting
100/FD was possible but it didn't quite work?


> DSP fixups addressed that issue but I'm not sure.
> For your case, the only way to address the issue at this moment is
> to use auto-negotiation but that would establish 1000baseT link
> which would add cost for you. Alternatively request half-duplex
> configuration to the provider to get a agreed link duplex.

We should still try to fix it somehow.  Also it would be nice if re(4),
or rephy(4) if we had that,  would document the issue properly in BUGS.


> See
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-amd64/2011-January/013589.html
> for details on parallel detection.

As someone from Hetzner has pointed out to me the original discussion
seemd to have been here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-November/059894.html


While I can understand the problem, has anyone contacted RealTek for
documentation to solve that matter, so that we could equally fix the
things as other major OSes have done by now (either themselves or by
a vendor update)?

/bz

-- 
Bjoern A. Zeeb                                 You have to have visions!
         <ks> Going to jail sucks -- <bz> All my daemons like it!
   http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/jails.html