freebsd stable - Mar 2005 - Possible problems with Broadcom BCM5704C 10/100/1000 on TyanThunder K8S pro S2882 twin Operteron

A couple of weeks ago we reported a potential problem with the Broadcom
BCM5704C 10/100/1000 onboard Ethernet (being used in Gigabit mode) controller
on the Tyan Thunder pro S2882 with twin Operteron and 8Gb of RAM.	

The system was running a three databases using mySQL - the first database ran
fine but the others when hit hard caused the server to crash in what appeared
to be a memory / Ethernet controller error.

We have now done the first phase of some tests and thought we would report
back. 

We switched off the broadcom Ethernet controller (via software) and routed all
traffic via the boards Intel 10/000 Ethernet connection.  One of the problem
databases has now been running for a few days and so far has been ok.

We will be doing some more tests over the next few days but this seems to be
pointing to some issues with the driver for the Broadcom Ethernet Chipset.  

Alan
> Having got 5.3 onto our new twin operteron Tyan Thunder K8S Pro S2882 with
8Gb
> of RAM and had a reasonabley stable operation for a few days we installed a
> couple of databases one worked fine but the other kept on causing the
server
> to crash.  After some hunting around we found discussion about problems
with
> the on board Broadcom BCM5704C 10/100/1000 Gigabit ethernet controller on
> Linux last year and wondered if there were similar issues with FreeBSD
5.3's
> broadcom driver?
> The problem only seems to happen when the controller is streched with lots
of
> data as the other mySQL database runs fine but switching to the more load
> intensive one causes issues.
>  
> 
> Thanks in advance for your advice.
> Alan Jay

On Mar 4, 2005, at 7:56 AM, Alan Jay wrote:
> We switched off the broadcom Ethernet controller (via software) and 
> routed all
> traffic via the boards Intel 10/000 Ethernet connection.  One of the 
> problem
> databases has now been running for a few days and so far has been ok.
>
FWIW, I have a dual opteron tyan 2881 board with 4GB and the same NIC 
chip (as identified by FreeBSD 5-STABLE).  No problems under pretty 
decent load.  Perhaps it has to do also with > 4Gb RAM.   Could you 
test that theory too?