Ted Unangst wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, mips wrote:
>
>
>>I had troubles with 8139 at work and since they have been swapped with
>>3com gears these troubles disapeared. I also know people that had
>>troubles with realtek cards too, so no it's not a myth.
>
>
> at last, a confirmed report. what kind of trouble were you having?
> i'd like to separate out the problems that come from the nic and the ones
> that don't.
>

My bad experience with rl was not when using one, but when trying to add
a second one. Always only the first one in the ifconfig sequence worked,
and the other layed stone dead. On switching the assignments around, the
working one went stone dead and the previously dead one worked. I ran
into this around the 3.2 cutover or maybe the 3.3 cutover. For me life's
too short to sweat multiple rl's.

MK

"M Khomo" <mkhomo@ostecs.com> wrote in message
news:c6itu502318@news4.newsguy.com...
> My bad experience with rl was not when using one, but when trying to add
> a second one. Always only the first one in the ifconfig sequence worked,
> and the other layed stone dead. On switching the assignments around, the
> working one went stone dead and the previously dead one worked. I ran
> into this around the 3.2 cutover or maybe the 3.3 cutover. For me life's
> too short to sweat multiple rl's.

Yes, I've run into exactly this too. Swapping out the 2nd rl for A.N.Other
NIC solved the problem.

OTOH, I've been running OBSD boxen with a combination of (a single) realtek
and other NICs for some years now with no problems.

Steve
http://www.fivetrees.com

On Sun, 25 Apr 2004 23:07:53 -0700
Ted Unangst <tedu@stanford.edu> wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, mips wrote:
>
> > I had troubles with 8139 at work and since they have been swapped
> > with 3com gears these troubles disapeared. I also know people that
> > had troubles with realtek cards too, so no it's not a myth.
>
> at last, a confirmed report. what kind of trouble were you
> having? i'd like to separate out the problems that come from the nic
> and the ones that don't.

We had about 10% of packet lost (connections were slow), some strange
behavior with ssh (sometimes sessions just drop down) and another
thing that i'm unable to remember right now.

If you check google you should find many hits about problems with 8139
on at least linux, freebsd and openbsd.

It's difficult to remember the reason for these problems (it was in
2000), but if i'm not wrong that was some "functions" that weren't
implemented in the prom or directly in the chipset. There was also
different versions (at least A,B and C) and only one was screwed
AFAICR.

mips

Ted Unangst wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, bards wrote:
>
>> > this must be one of those YMMV issues. I've been using Realtek8139
>> > nics
>> > for years because they've been cheap, fast and flawless for me.
>> > Others say they suck. go figure
>>
>> Indeed, I think they get a mention on the openbsd website too. Cant
>> find it but I'm sure I've read an 'avoid like plague' warning.
>
> i know i've shoveled gigabytes and gigabytes through rl nics without
> any
> trouble. i can't actually recall anybody with a network problem that
> was
> confirmed to be a realtek's fault. i've seen lots of posts where
> people with rl nics had network trouble, but never a followup to say
> swapping the
> nic solved the problem. in short, people have heard they suck, and
> tell other people they suck, but no one has experienced said suckage.
>
> people key in on the word realtek every time it's in a post, and are
> always willing to blame the card, all evidence to the contrary, which
> rarely solves the problem and is just more runaround.
>
> they may not be the best performers (which just means they use more
> cpu, not that they can't handle 100mbit), but if your connection is
> pppoe,
> the realtek is really, really not the bottleneck. lots of people are
> fond of quoting the driver comment which says you need "a 400MHz PII
> or some
> equally overmuscled CPU to drive it." that was seven years ago. cpus
> get
> twice as fast every 1.5 years. you do the math.

Ted, you should put this summary on the OpenBSD site. Well said, well
documented. As a matter of fact I have seen far more problems with
expensive 3com cards than with cheap realteks.

EJ
--
Remove the obvious part (including the dot) for my email address.
http://www.vanwesten.net for examples of ipf and pf.

Alexander Ost <KFAOUBTKCTUT@spammotel.com> writes:

> Ted Unangst <tedu@stanford.edu> writes:
>
> > for the OP, output of vmstat -m and netstat -m may be informative. it
> > sounds like a memory leak. a lot of these were fixed with 3.4, and
> > another lot in 3.5.
>
> Thanks for the hint, I'll check the outputs. And 3.5 is on my list as
> well.

It took about a week for the error to appear again, but now I have the
debugging stats. Again, after restarting ppp/pppoe, all interfaces
have disappeared, and ifconfig says

$ ifconfig -a
: no such interface

The problem persists when going back to single user mode, only
rebooting helps.

I took netstats about 15 minutes before and after the problem
appeared:

before:
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
In use 1798K, total allocated 2820K; utilization 63.8%
777 mbufs in use:
518 mbufs allocated to data
255 mbufs allocated to packet headers
4 mbufs allocated to socket names and addresses
189/213/1024 mbuf cluster pages in use (current/peak/max)
1244 Kbytes allocated to network (46% in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
10 calls to protocol drain routines
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

after:
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
In use 1023K, total allocated 2812K; utilization 36.4%
43 mbufs in use:
17 mbufs allocated to data
22 mbufs allocated to packet headers
4 mbufs allocated to socket names and addresses
0/213/1024 mbuf cluster pages in use (current/peak/max)
1244 Kbytes allocated to network (0% in use)
0 requests for memory denied
0 requests for memory delayed
10 calls to protocol drain routines
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The memstats are a bit too long to post here; I put them on

http://home.arcor.de/fractal9/tmp/memstat-before.txt
http://home.arcor.de/fractal9/tmp/memstat-after.txt

I also took a ktrace of 'ifconfig -a', if this is of any help:

http://home.arcor.de/fractal9/tmp/ktrace-after.txt

I didn't find anything striking in the logs, but then, I didn't know
about memstat/netstat's existence until a week ago ;-)

Any hints on what makes the interfaces disappear appreciated... I'll
try with 3.5 next.

/alex