freebsd stable - Feb 2005 - Possible problems with Broadcom BCM5704C 10/100/1000 on Tyan Motherboard

Hi,

I have FreeBSD 5.3 STABLE onto our new twin operteron Tyan Thunder K8S Pro
S2882 with 8Gb of RAM and had a reasonably 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.  

I have searched the archive and there were issues last year but I couldn't
work out if these have been totally resolved?

The adapter does work fine in low levels of loading but when pushed (it is
connected to a Gigabit switch) it seems to be the cause of the reboot - a what
appeared to be stable server with moderate Ethernet activity was fine upping
the activity with a new service caused regular reboots.

There is no console message at the point of reboot to help that we have
spotted.

After some hunting around we found discussion about problems with this
motherboards 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 stretched 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.

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Alan Jay wrote:
> I have FreeBSD 5.3 STABLE onto our new twin operteron Tyan Thunder K8S Pro
> S2882 with 8Gb of RAM and had a reasonably 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.
I'm about to gain access to an S2881, which is a similar board (different
layout but same parts).
> I have searched the archive and there were issues last year but I
couldn't
> work out if these have been totally resolved?
>
> The adapter does work fine in low levels of loading but when pushed (it is
> connected to a Gigabit switch) it seems to be the cause of the reboot - a
what
> appeared to be stable server with moderate Ethernet activity was fine
upping
> the activity with a new service caused regular reboots.
>
> There is no console message at the point of reboot to help that we have
> spotted.

Hm, triple fault or other hardware reset. This usually indicates bad
hardware.  Have you tried swapping the RAM between the systems and seeing
if the problem follows?  An unrecoverable ECC fault can cause a reboot,
along with strangeness caused  by temperature/power supply/etc.  Or the
board could be Just Plain Bad.

Considering you have one working machine, adn this is a very popular
board, I don't think it s abasic problem with FreeBSD and this hardware.
The worst thing reported is interrupt routing usually.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite@gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org

I concur that the situation got much better with 5.3-Stable.  What I
experienced afterward occurred only under load.

-Jonathan

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Alan Jay wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 04:53:24PM -0000, Alan Jay wrote:
> > > I had major problems installing with more than 4Gb but once I
moved to
> > stable
> > > we seemed to have a stable platform when doing basic stuff - we
have two
> > > databases (mySQL) one is reasonably heavily used and one very
extensively
> > > used.
> >
> > Just to be clear, you're stating you had stability problems with
> > 5.3-RELEASE and >4GB.  But with 5.3-STABLE and >4GB you have a
stable
> > system.  Correct?
>
> [Alan Jay] I could not install with RELEASE but could with Stable.
>
> Once installed and running we installed mySQL on the two machines one we
> copied over a relatively simple database which ran fine without a problem.
>
> The second machine then had another mySQL database moved to it and it
started
> to fall over.  After a number of tests we moved the first database off the
> what had been working server and put the other database on it.  At which
point
> that server which had been stable fell over!
>
> > > I think I agree wholeheartedly with your comments being a great
supporter
> > of
> > > FreeBSD it is a shame that the AMD release is not as super as the
other
> > > versions we have used extensively.
> >
> > The problem is a major bug that has existed since FreeBSD ?3.0? was
> > exposed very close to the 5.3 release cycle.  This bug only causes a
> > major problem with >4GB, thus few of us developers experienced it.
> > [Most of us can't afford >4GB in our machines.  Donations of
1GB DIMMs
> > for FreeBSD developers are accepted by donations@FreeBSD.org.]
>
> [Alan Jay] I'll put them on my present list :)
>
> > Of course one reason many are moving to the AMD64 platform is to have
> > >4GB RAM in the machine.  We believe this bug has been fixed in
> > 5.3-STABLE.  But too few people are testing 5.3-STABLE and are using
> > 5.3-RELEASE instead.  This isn't helping us QA the issue so that
we know
> > all the corner cases are fixed in upcoming 5.4 release.
>
> [Alan Jay] Well the memory seemed to be stable on 5.3 STABLE with more than
> 4Gb in our case 8Gb there seems to be some other problem at work here.
>
> > A recent 5.3-STABLE snapshot can be found as
> >
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/Feb_2005/5.3-STABLE-SNAP001-
> > amd64-miniinst.iso
> > and mirrors.
> >
> > --
> > -- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)
>