Re: bnx(4) thread consumes 100%+ of CPU.

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%mylinuxisp.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2017, Swift Griggs wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Jul 2017, John D. Baker wrote:

> > Driver issue? Hardware failing? I could switch to its second interface,
> >"bnx1" and see if it does the same thing.
>
> I may be mis-remembering, but I think I've seen these kind of
> kernel-threads-going-nuts with a Broadcom interface before. I hate
> Broadcom NICs (old war wounds) and I immediately blamed the NIC and

I'm not a fan of anything from Broadcom, mainly due to their stance
on documentation for their products.  While I've heard of various
problems with some of their NICs, this is the first time I've had any
problem related to one.

It was a free (as in kitten) server, so I figured to use it.

> switched it out with a Intel server NIC. However, perhaps I should
> have filed a PR.

Curiously enough, there was exactly this NIC in one of this machine's
PCIe slots.  I removed it as being redundant for my needs at the time
(about two years ago).  Perhaps it was there for a reason.  If push
comes to shove, I can put it back (I'd like to haxxor a low-profile rear
plate for it first).


I have a bunch of other machines which also use various flavors of
Broadcom NICs, mostly bnx(4), but some bge(4).

I have had some trouble net-booting bnx(4)-equipped machines.  They tend
to hang during the database re-build step of 'rc' processing after a
system update.  I can usually coax them to work by stopping in single-user
mode, manually mounting the other NFS file systems and running 'etcupdate'
then rebooting.

But it might be they are finicky about marginal gigabit ethernet switches
(I have a couple that are slowly going insane after a lightning strike
last year).

-- 
|/"\ John D. Baker, KN5UKS               NetBSD     Darwin/MacOS X
|\ / jdbaker[snail]mylinuxisp[flyspeck]com    OpenBSD            FreeBSD
| X  No HTML/proprietary data in email.   BSD just sits there and works!
|/ \ GPGkeyID:  D703 4A7E 479F 63F8 D3F4  BD99 9572 8F23 E4AD 1645