Since getting my cable upgraded to 24Mbit down and 10Mbit up and
getting excited with torrents, I've started experiencing weird errors
with my 3Com NIC whenever it's being used at high speeds. It'll
basically work fine for a while until it suddenly stops sending any
packets and the connection to the switch is dropped, combined with
this error message:
xl1: transmission error: 90
xl1: tx underrun, increasing tx start threshold to 120 bytes
I can "fix" it by running ifconfig xl1 down; ifconfig xl1 up, but then
it'll bork out again later on when it feels the traffic's too
congested (which happens around 2MB/s torrent downloads, I think).
The machine in question is FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE and works as a router,
with two 3Coms, like so:
xl0: <3Com 3c905B-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0x1000-0x107f mem
0xe8000000-0xe800007f irq 11 at device 14.0 on pci0
xl1: <3Com 3c905-TX Fast Etherlink XL> port 0x1080-0x10bf irq 10 at
device 15.0 on pci0
xl0 is connected to the cable modem, xl1 is connected to the internal
network switch, and the traffic should be pretty much the same on both
interfaces, but only xl1 chokes, for some reason.
In case this is interesting:
xl0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
options=9<RXCSUM,VLAN_MTU>
inet6 fe80::213:4bff:fe02:279d%xl0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
inet 84.254.172.155 netmask 0xffffe000 broadcast 255.255.255.255
ether 00:10:4b:07:27:9d
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
status: active
xl1: flags=8847<UP,BROADCAST,DEBUG,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
options=8<VLAN_MTU>
inet6 fe80::260:8ff:fe6d:3c00%xl1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
inet 192.168.1.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
ether 00:60:08:6d:3c:00
media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>)
status: active
Any clues as to what I can do to stop it?
Regards,
Patrik Roos