broken re(4)

[Gerrit Kühn]

Hi folks,

I have four identical ITX boards from Jetway here, each having two re(4)
onboard nics:

re0 at pci0:0:9:0: class=0x020000 card=0x10ec16f3 chip=0x816710ec rev=0x10
hdr=0x00 vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor'
    device     = 'RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
re1 at pci0:0:11:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x10ec16f3 chip=0x816710ec
rev=0x10 hdr=0x00 vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor'
    device     = 'RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet NIC'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet
atapci0 at pci0:0:15:0:    class=0x01018f card=0x31491106 chip=0x31491106
rev=0x80 


I run FreeBSD 7-stable from early March 08 on three of these
machines and noticed no problems with networking with that so far.
Some days ago I installed a fourth machine with 7-stable from early May
(and some days later -because of the problems described below- to May
17th). With this new machine I see several networking problems. The most
prominent are these two:

- heavy networking traffic (in this case backup via tar & NFS) causes hangs
for about 10s-30s and sometimes also leads to watchdog timeouts: 
May 27 09:04:07 protoserve kernel: re0: watchdog timeout 
May 27 09:04:07 protoserve kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN
May 27 09:04:10 protoserve kernel: re0: link state changed to UP

- copying large files (more than some 100MB) via ssh/scp drops the
connection due to "corrupted MAC on input":
Disconnecting: Corrupted MAC on input.
lost connection

In the latter case the networking traffic should actually not be that
high, because these are nanobsd systems which are transferring a new image
file (system update, 2GB) via ssh (so the bottleneck should be the write
speed of the CF card used to hold the system).


I do not see these problems with the old codebase from March 08 on my old
machines. The cvs shows a large MFC for the re-driver in April, so I
guessed something came in there which broke things here. Therefore I
downgraded the new system to a cvs codebase from March 1st, but the
problems persist. They also exist on both interfaces. memtest86 is running
for hours now without finding something wrong.

Any hints what I should do next to find the culprit?


cu
  Gerrit