On 20 Oct 2006 17:21:45 -0500, Peter Eisch <peter@boku.net> wrote:
>
>Has anyone experienced a similar 3.x behavior under vmware that results in
>vmware dumping core?  It seems to be related to if_pcn and how vmware
>emulates it.  Because of the nature of the environment, I can't get/catch
>core inside NetBSD.
>
>Oct 20 15:15:14: vcpu-0| NOT_IMPLEMENTED
>/build/mts/release/bora-29996/pompeii2005/bora/devices/net/vlance_shared.c:6
>98

Yes, we have encountered this.  According to gkm (who works/worked at
VMWare), it's a VMWare bug with the vlance emulation only supporting
"15 sg elements in esx".  We were also seeing hangs of output from
individual NetBSD VMs (e.g. a ssh session would hang when hit with
lots of output).

The included patch seems to be handling things for us (we haven't
seen crashes or hangs since it was put in place).

gkm said that "the network folks said you should push to get a
[VMWare] bug filed on this", but unfortunately I couldn't get the
people who run the VMWare systems here to do so (they were afraid that
VMWare would stop giving us support for _any_ bugs or crashes if they
found we had a guest running a "non-supported" OS , even if the problem
was with a completely different guest or server).

jdarrow

--- /current/src/sys/dev/pci/if_pcn.c_v1.32	2006-10-16 19:28:36.000000000 -0500
+++ /current/src/sys/dev/pci/if_pcn.c	2006-10-18 02:17:04.000000000 -0500
@@ -126,7 +126,11 @@
  * DMA segments, but only allocate the max of 512 descriptors.  The
  * transmit logic can deal with this, we just are hoping to sneak by.
  */
+#ifdef PCN_VMWARE_SGLIMIT
+#define	PCN_NTXSEGS		4
+#else
 #define	PCN_NTXSEGS		16
+#endif /* PCN_VMWARE_SGLIMIT */
 
 #define	PCN_TXQUEUELEN		128
 #define	PCN_TXQUEUELEN_MASK	(PCN_TXQUEUELEN - 1)

-- 
John Darrow - Senior Technical Specialist
Computing Services, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187
Email: John.P.Darrow+netbsd-users@wheaton.edu (plain text please, no HTML or MS)
Neither spammers nor cold-callers will ever get my business, so don't bother.