FreeBSD -STABLE servers repeatedly crashing.

[Gary Mulder]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Pawel Malachowski wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 04:09:58PM -0400, Matt Juszczak wrote:
> 
> > Correct.  IPF is unstable with our SMP (most of the time) - based 5.x 
> > boxes.  VERY unstable.  VERY VERY unstable.
> 
> Hm, this sounds bad. What is debug.mpsafenet set to? How big is traffic?
> 
> I have one SMP box with ipnat, routing some megabits (even during night
> it's more than 30-40Mbps) without problems, however, ipnat is used only
> for very small group of hosts right now.
> But we plan to use ipnat more heavily so it sounds a bit scary. ;)
 
>From personal experience I can repeat what Matt has stated. It seems to be 
related to what NIC you have. I have had crashes with fxp (Intel Pro 
100MBit) and bge (Broadcom Gigabit) NICs under moderate network load. 
Removing ipf reduced but did not eliminate the crashes. debug.mpsafe also 
reduced but did not eliminate the crashes.
 
Another person on the freebsd-amd64 list reported similar network-related 
crashes until he switched to em (Intel Gigabit Ethernet) NICs.
 
Gary