Instability in re driver?

[Thomas Mueller]

> > Are you sure it's Realtek's fault as opposed to a bug in FreeBSD's re driver?

from Dennis Glatting:

> Nope. All I can say, over the past couple of years, I have had
> consistent problems with re under FreeBSD and zip with Intel.
        
> That same MB (A78M-M) under CentOS 6.5 had problems with the RealTek
> too. That system is powered off for the next couple of days and I am
> unsure of current settings. IIRC, I had better luck with FreeBSD than
> CentOS with this MB.

> I have another MB, a MSI 990FXA-GD80, that didn't like the RealTek
> (8111E) under CentOS 6.5 so I plugged in an Intel. Worked fine then.

My luck with re driver has been all-or-nothing.  If it connected, no further problems with the driver.

Otherwise, at least in FreeBSD, re produced memory instability after failing to connect, and I could get an unexpected, unprovoked system crash much later.

So I added to /boot/loader.conf
hint.re.0.disabled="1"

But other motherboards with Ethernet recognized by re driver give different results; some may even fail in NetBSD but work with FreeBSD.

I use DragonFlyBSD and OpenBSD dd'ed to USB stick only for test purposes; not sufficiently compatible with my hardware, especially the hard drive setup with GPT.

Tom