OpenWrt Forum Archive

Topic: ixp4xx NPE strange intermittent problem

The content of this topic has been archived on 4 Apr 2018. There are no obvious gaps in this topic, but there may still be some posts missing at the end.

I was wondering if anyone else had seen the problem I'm having :

On Gateworks Avila boards I'm running 7.07. Mostly everything works
perfectly. However once in a while, after boot up the Ethernet interface
doesn't work. By that I mean that I am unable to successfully arp
either in or out. Wireless interfaces continue to work ok. Then, without
changing any config whatsoever, I can reboot the board and find that
eth0 is working ok. Once it gets into the 'broken' state it seems to need
a power cycle to cure it. I don't see anything strange in dmesg
or from ifconfig when it's broken. Everything looks fine, it just doesn't
transmit any packets after the boot is finished. ifconfig usually
shows a few packets tx, but the count never increases.
I've used tcpdump to determine that the kernel isn't doing something
crazy like transmit the arp responses on the wrong interface.
I've removed the openwrt bridge configuration (sysctl directives
that disable arp).

As I said above, the boards work 90% of the time, so I am suspecting
some race condition in the driver initialization. The hardware has two
ethernet ports but I'm only using one.

Thanks for any pointers.

I am experiencing the same problem with Kamikaze 7.09 on Pronghorn metro.

Any clue?

Thank you

I'll look into merging the other (soon mainlined) open source driver, and we'll see of that works better.

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