Re: install/50832: NetBSD-7.0 iso won't acquire DHCPv4 lease in SmartOS' KVM (and more)

[James Blachly <james.blachly%gmail.com@localhost>]

At this time I think the title of this problem report is misleading, as clearly this issue is greater than just acquiring DHCP leases, but instead related to network connectivity in general.

New information:

Interestingly, by setting the following property in SmartOS KVM zone definition (thanks to freqlabs on #netbsd), I was able to gain network connectivity (but with flaws, see below)

"allow_dhcp_spoofing": true

Now, bringing up the vioif0 interface with static IP as below gives network connectivity to my LAN

ifconfig vioif0 inet 192.168.1.7 netmask 255.255.255.0

No other guest OS requires this property unless it is actually doing DHCP serving, which to me suggests there may be some subtle error in the NetBSD7 virtio driver/net stack that manifests only when certain types of packets are blocked.  I have asked the SmartOS team for more information on the specifics of what filter is removed when “allow_dhcp_spoofing” is set to true. 


However, at the same time I noted that ICMP echo times are highly variable for round-trips originating at NetBSD 7, but not round-trips originating elsewhere on the LAN.

netbsd# ping 192.168.1.40
PING 192.168.1.40 (192.168.1.40): 56 data bytes
…omitted…
——192.168.1.40 PING Statistics——
32 packets transmitted, 32 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.324890/54.664590/115.626610/40.018308 ms

* CONTRAST *

physical-machine$ ping 192.168.1.7
PING 192.168.1.7 (192.168.1.7): 56 data bytes
…omitted…
--- 192.168.1.7 ping statistics ---
31 packets transmitted, 31 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.983/6.033/21.188/4.394 ms