Weird bug problems with timing of NIC driver loading?

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

>
>Hi,
>
>I have a weird bug report I need some help tracking down:
>
>With both the G3 using either tulip or  bmac NICs and the new G4 using
>Sungmem I can reliably and repeatedly show funky net behavior when those
>drivers are compiled in or loaded early in the boot process as modules.
>
>This behavior is funny in that ifconfig shows no errors and that packets
>are being sent and received (and the lights on the cards seem to support
>that) but none of the received info ever seems to make it back upstream
>from the card (a receive buffer alignment issue?)
>
>This is repeatable with both machines and with BMAC, TULIP, and SUNGEM
>when compiled in or loaded as a module during the normal eth0
>initialization during bootup
>
>If I simply compile them as modules and wait until the machine is up and
>simply do an insmod and configure the network, they ALL work absolutely
>perfectly.

That is weird, you are the first person to report such a problem,
and since such a broad range of HW is affected, I'd rather blame some
other kernel routing problem, possibly some setup of your init scripts,
(or some ECN issue ?)

>So whatever the issue is, it seems to be related to when in the boot
>process the NIC code is invoked.
>
>Is this due to some change in memory mapping?

No, nothing here should matter.

>Is this due to some  change in IRQ assignment?

Neither. IRQ assignement isn't changed, it comes from the firmware
and works on all known HW.

>Is this due to some alignment issue with DMA buffers and memory / caches?

I don't think so, especially recent machines have no known cache
coherency problems.

>So what is different when a module is loaded by modprobe during the eth0
>initialization during bootup versus waiting until the end and then
>running insmod to load the module and configure the network.
>
>Just to check I made sure there were no firewall modules loaded at all
>and that the network routing tables and things were set properly
>(identical to the hand done case at the end of boot-up).
>
>This problem seems to exist in every 2.4.X kernel I have tried.
>
>This problem does not exist in 2.2.X kernels.

That's weird, it could well be an ecn problem. Do you have a switch
or a hub ? to what machine are you trying to talk to ? It really look
like a problem above the drivers.

Ben.


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