On 8/23/2025 9:31 PM, R Tyler Croy wrote:
(replies inline)


On Saturday, August 23rd, 2025 at 6:24 PM, Karl Denninger<[email protected]> 
wrote:

What physical hardware is on that driver?

I have a box here with two ix interfaces in it that is my edge router and beat 
the SNOT out of it without problems. This is what the boot messages are for 
them in my machine here:
These are both identical 10GigE NICs, from dmesg

ix0: <Intel(R) X540-AT2> mem 0xe0400000-0xe05fffff,0xe0600000-0xe0603fff irq 18 
at device 0.0 on pci1
ix0: Using 2048 TX descriptors and 2048 RX descriptors
ix0: Using 2 RX queues 2 TX queues
ix0: Using MSI-X interrupts with 3 vectors
ix0: allocated for 2 queues
ix0: allocated for 2 rx queues
ix0: Ethernet address: a0:36:9f:38:44:a8
ix0: PCI Express Bus: Speed 5.0GT/s Width x8
ix0: fw 4.2.0 nvm 4.03.0 eTrack 0x8000037c
ix0: netmap queues/slots: TX 2/2048, RX 2/2048


System: FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE-p4

When I was chasing that arpresolve warning I saw in the console, I did see some 
discussion like this 
(https://be-virtual.net/pfsense-arpresolve-cant-allocate-llinfo-for-x-x-x-x-on-emx/)
 about funky routers on the other end of the link causing trouble. Since this 
is a newer fiber rollout from my local ISP (Sonic) I wouldn't be surprised if 
there was something funky happening there. Since the LAN-side routing goes 
haywire, I'm thinking that's a red herring.

Probably.  Do you have TSO and LRO off on at least the external interface?  You might try turning those off on BOTH interfaces.  When it goes dead is it Ip4, Ip6 or both?   I'm on 14.3 but as you can see the kernel is a couple of months old.

I had some funky-chicken stuff going on here with Ip6 for a while with my ISP (Gigabit fiber) when I switched to them from former cable service; the inside interface on my end is on 10Gig SFP+ (Twinax to the switch) where the external is a copper SFP transceiver to the back of the ONT.  I got it sorted; they were being rather persnickety (and odd) in that their end "married" the duid presented to the MAC and my setup runs all out of RAM (nanobsd, thus power safe) and thus by default duid is not invariant across boots.  It only impacted Ip6; it would not get a delegation after the first time it booted unless they reset their end, but Ip4 was unaffected -- apparently they have completely different infrastructure on their end between the stacks when it comes to delegation.  I was able to fix that by making sure the duid was in fact invariant but it took a good long while to figure out what was going on, plus they also are a bit bizarre in how they send down route advertisements to my end.  Its been stable now for ~2 months; last reset on that box was some 60 days ago with no network disruptions and I run a fair bit of video streaming out that connection to users on the Internet at-large (the actual source is on the inside network link through a Mellanox card into the switch at 10G.)

My level of success with RealTek 2.5Gb NICs in this service has not been good at all but the ix driver has not caused any trouble.  I saw plenty of issue with arp mappings for the ISP side of the link just flat-out *disappearing* with the RealTek interfaces from time to time; downing and uping the interface would clear it but obviously that's very bad news and iperf3 into those interfaces would also show ridiculous retry counts thus jitter to stream watchers was off-the-rack.  I know the issue wasn't on the ISP side because an older pcEngines box, while not able to saturate the link, had zero trouble (it has Intel chipset gigabit interfaces in it) as does what I'm using now on the ix interfaces.

--
Karl Denninger
[email protected]
/The Market Ticker/
/[S/MIME encrypted email preferred]/

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