netbsd-11 vs. SUNW,qfe; hmeX: device timeout?

["John D. Baker" <jdbaker%consolidated.net@localhost>]

Way back in the NetBSD-7.2 era, I installed a SUNW,qfe (quad-fast-ethernet).
Four hme(4) interfaces on a single SBUS card.  It mostly worked, except
that some websites would be broken and FTP (via ftp-proxy and pf) didn't
work at all.  So, I had to put that machine aside and use something else.

In the years since, there was a bug found and fixed that may have been
the underlying problem, but I didn't bother with updating that machine
to see if that fixed the issue.

Recently, I had opportunity and motivation to dig that machine out again
and update it to NetBSD-11.0_RC3.  While running the existing 7.2_STABLE
install, updating the kernel and modules over NFS was no problem.  Once
rebooted into the 11.0_RC3 GENERIC kernel, "hme0" configured OK and
shows that it is active and has carrier, but any network operation
hangs indefinitely.  If I wait long enough, I'll eventually get messages
about "hme0: device timeout".  Sometimes these don't appear until I'm
in the process of rebooting the machine.

Netboot/NFS root has similar issues.  The initial RARP/BOOTP/tftp works
fine and loads the bootloader and the kernel, but once the kernel is
running, the in-kernel bootp client _might_ succeed and then it hangs
trying to mount the NFS root or it times out and falls back to bootparam
which also fails.  After a couple of iterations of this, it panics.
(need to capture the panic message--something about freeing something
that was already freed).

I should go back and try ports 1-3 on the card to see if the behavior
is the same in all cases.

I have a couple of machines with plain single-interface hme(4) cards
and they work fine with 11.0_{BETA,RC[23]} and -current.

Anyone else poke at using a SUNW,qfe card?

(I also have a couple of qec/qe cards and a couple of qec/be cards,
but I haven't tried those in a long time.  I used to use the qec/qe
cards before I got the qfe cards.)

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