sk0: watchdog timeout

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Vladimir Dvorak wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have a problem with network card. From time to time kernel says
>
>sk0: watchdog timeout
>
>It has (probably) random behavior.
>
>I use FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p8, motherboard is ASUS A8V Deluxe (AMD64,
>Athlon64XP 3200+) and internal network card from pciconf -v -l
>
>skc0 at pci0:10:0: class=0x020000 card=0x811a1043 chip=0x432011ab rev=0x13
>hdr=0x00
>    vendor   = 'Marvell Semiconductor (Was: Galileo Technology Ltd)'
>    device   = '88E8001 Gigabit 32-bit Ethernet Controller with
>Integrated PHY'
>    class    = network
>
I have the same motherboard and ethernet chipset, and don't have these 
problems, so *maybe* there's some hardware problem with yours, or maybe 
I just don't load the ethernet as much.

However, I have had numerous ethernet chips over the years which 
produced these errors every now and again, and I have always safely 
ignored them.  Run some stress tests before you ship the machine, but if 
you get decent(*) performance then I'd just ship it without being concerned.

--Alex

(*) Decent, is of course not likely to be Gigabit!   Try the nttcp port 
for measuring the performance you get; ftp performance will likely be 
limited by disk-read; and ssh is just rubbish on fast networks unless 
you install ssh-hpn port which fixes some problems and also adds the 
ability to not encrypt the data transfer (just the authentication) which 
is useful on closed-ish networks.