re0 died last night; here's how I half-revived it

[Kirk Strauser]

I have a FreeBSD 8-STABLE system that's been running stably since I  
last upgraded and rebooted on May 8. Yesterday, I updated /usr/src to  
get ZFS v28 and also seem to have gotten rid of my nice, solid re0  
network interface:

re0: <RealTek 8168/8111 B/C/CP/D/DP/E PCIe Gigabit Ethernet> port  
0xb000-0xb0ff mem 0xea210000-0xea210fff,0xea200000-0xea20ffff irq 16  
at device 0.0 on pci5
re0: Using 1 MSI-X message
re0: Chip rev. 0x3c000000
re0: MAC rev. 0x00400000
miibus0: <MII bus> on re0

I'm too tired from lack of sleep due to getting the system back up and  
running to remember all the details, but the summary is that it  
started autodetecting its media as 10baseT/UTP. Almost immediately  
after boot - sometimes while still playing in single-user mode - I'd  
start seeing "no buffer space available" error messages all over the  
place.

Forcing media to 1000baseTX/full-duplex fixed the problem for a few  
minutes, but it wouldn't stay in that state and would shortly start  
throwing "no buffer space available" errors again. Until I've gotten  
some sleep and have more mental energy to figure out exactly what's  
going on, I've found that forcing the media to 100baseTX keeps it  
solidly chugging along (if a little slowly).

Anyway, that's where I'm at now. If your re NIC is giving you fits  
this morning, try setting it to 100baseTX and see if that'll get you  
running until a better fix comes along.

- Kirk