Woops, my bad, the card MUST be in 100baseTX to communicate with the
router on the other end.  Apparently, when the link goes down, it
reverts to 10Mbps when it comes back up.  I fixed the config so that
doesn't happen any more, but the problem with running "out of rx
descriptors" remains with the new configuration, which is:

be0: flags=8863<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu
1500
        address: 08:00:20:71:fa:20
        media: Ethernet 100baseTX (100baseTX half-duplex)
        status: active
        inet6 fe80::a00:20ff:fe71:fa20%be0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2

If I understand Volker's message correctly then, my TMS390 @ 60MHz
simply might not have the required gusto to clear the buffers.  Is there
no way I can utilize my 320MB of system memory? :^)

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Kevin Halverson
kwh@montana.edu

On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 23:59, Volker Borchert wrote:
> In message <1046105676.512.32.camel@dionysus.msu.montana.edu> you write:
> 
> |> I've got a Sparcstation 20 with a BigMac Ethernet card running
> |> NetBSD-1.6, and I'm trying to use tcpdump to grab packets off of a very
> |> high traffic router (via a mirrored port).
> |> 
> |> The card is configured as follows:
> |> 
> |> be0:flags=8963<UP,BROADCAST,NOTRAILERS,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mt
> |> u 1500
> |>         address: 08:00:20:71:fa:20
> |>         media: Ethernet autoselect (10baseT half-duplex)
> |>         status: active
> |>         inet6 fe80::a00:20ff:fe71:fa20%be0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2
> |> 
> |> Anyway, the problem I seem to be running into is that when there are a
> |> lot of packets on the wire, I fill up my buffers and start getting the
> |> error "be0: out of rx descriptors" (the BE_CR_STAT_RXDROP interrupt
> |> defined in dev/sbus/bereg.h).
> 
> Were the card running at 100 Mbit/sec I'd suspect your CPU can't
> keep up. 10 Mbit/sec should not be a problem but it's at least
> worth checking.
> 
> 	vb