Nick Holland wrote:
Limaunion wrote:
hi all! I've been using OpenBSD during the last 2-3 years mainly running
it as a firewall.
I've an old machine (486 + 48MB RAM) and yesterday decided to make
some improvements: upgrade it from 4.0 to 4.2 (new installation) and
replace the two NICs, switching from NE2000 clones (RTL8029) to 3C905B.
The problem is that i'm getting ton of this messages which
bring down the two interfaces:
xl0: reset didn't complete
xl1: reset didn't complete
xl0: command never completed!
xl1: command never completed!
I found that man xl already has some information about 'command never
completed' but in this case the driver does not continue to function
normally. Is this problem a combination of old hardware with the xl
interfaces ? or are this interfaces crap too ? switching to a newer
machine (pentium 166) may help ? or should I buy another brand (which) ?
xl(4) devices are pretty far down the list as far as performance and
quality. However, I haven't seen those messages in quite some time,
and never saw them as fatal failures as you are.
HOWEVER, that being said, I haven't seen a 486 with a good PCI bus in
a while, either. Most of the "real" 486 systems with PCI busses
probably worked for something in some way on some OS, but not for me.
(I have a few AMD5x86-oriented boards that appear to have a very
functional PCI bus, but those were in the Pentium days. Actually,
on closer examination, you may have one of those boards.)
SO, I'm going to guess it is a combination of a cranky driver in a
slightly non-standard PCI bus.
For a quick fix, let's look back to your RT8029 cards. While the
RT8029 is probably about the worst performing NIC to ever go on a
PCI bus, it will handle most home-grade uses just fine. I suspect
the PCI bus on the things will give them better performance than any
ISA card, and I've moved a lot of data through ISA cards in the past.
So, were you having a problem with the RT8029s, or just trying to
put in a "better" card? Odds are, if you need the performance of a
100Mbps card, you may be needing a new computer (in which case, your
P166 is probably great). If you didn't NEED the performance, put
the 8029-based cards back in.
Hm. Looking at your dmesg, I see
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (bios)
which I don't recall having seen before...might be worth checking
to see if the BIOS has a "PNP Aware OS" mode for the BIOS. (heh,
just spot checked a couple machines, they both have this line, but
both say "(no bios)". So much for my memory, which should lead one
to doubt my interpretation, but still might be an interesting test.
Once I get some space on a shelf, might have to plug one of my
similar looking boards in, see what it does. :)
Thanks in advance for any help!.
Jorge
PS: on 2006-01-06 I reported a keyboard problem with OpenBSD 3.8, the
problem is still present with 4.2:
http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=113658848307726&w=2
Dang, I think I remember that. Had me scratching back then, too.
Not doing any better now...
This might be a stinker of a MoBo. We just don't have too many
keyboard problems reported...
Nick.
>
Hi Nick & all!
This computer is my personal home firewall which is connected to a 3Mbps
Internet link. The main reason why I wanted to switch the NICs is
because the high number of interrupts I was getting while saturating the
link, ie: downloading torrent files, which brought the cpu usage up to
100%. It seem that we all agree that this problem is related to this
combination of hardware..., hey! I just wanted to squeeze this box :)
As Nick has suggested, yesterday I decided to go back to the previous
NICs (RT8029). I'll keep them till I switch my hardware and see what
happens.
Thanks for all the replies!
Jorge.
PS: for some reason during the reboots I got some kernel panics (3 in
total), I don't have a complete report mainly because the keyboard (as
I've already explained) doesn't work, but the last one said (HTH):
panic: softdep_setup_inomapdep: found inode
stopped at Debugger+0x4: leave
