[ Solved ] ethernet module crashes with IOMMU enabled

Anon-E-moose · Last edited by Anon-E-moose on Wed Mar 06, 2013 7:04 pm; edited 2 times in total

I've just bought a new Asus MB (m5a99fx pro r2.0) and am having problems with getting the ethernet to not crash.

If IOMMU is enabled (getting ready to do pass through virtualization) then the driver will crash (minutes to hours later)

I get

s4e8 · Guru Joined: 29 Jul 2006 Posts: 311

add iommu=pv to grub.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:03 pm Post subject:

No difference
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

_______0 · Guru Joined: 15 Oct 2012 Posts: 521

passthrough is only available with IOMMU, or would plain kvm do the job? I think it could be a solution to add a second card instead to use with the vm instead of crazy net configurations.

thnks

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:39 pm Post subject:

I'm not even getting to the point of doing the virtualization.

I simply have IOMMU turned on in the bios and am running standard linux 3.8.1 and the ethernet module crashes,
if I turn off IOMMU then no crash.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 7:57 pm Post subject:

I went and picked up a pcie card, it's a realtek 8111/8168 but rev 06 not 09.

Seems to be working so far.

Not sure if this is a realtek problem or a combo problem, realtek 8111f/8168f AND iommu or if it's simply bad hardware.

I'm not sure how to contact the kernel developers to see if there are problems with the latest realtek chipsets and iommu,
so I'm not marking this as solved just yet.
I'll let it run overnight and then see what transpires.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Mar 05, 2013 3:17 pm Post subject:

Found out yesterday that the sound doesn't work with IOMMU enabled (oss 4.2.2007)
It works ok with alsa.

Is there a way to find out if the problem with these devices is kernel code or bios implementation?
Both the ethernet and onboard sound work with iommu disabled so the hardware is fine.

Thanks for any help.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Mad Merlin · Veteran Joined: 09 May 2005 Posts: 1155

I have hardware with an IOMMU as well, though I'm currently not using it. Anyways, when I moved from kernel 3.0 to 3.2.9, I started getting crashes when copying large files over the network, very similar to your symptoms. I have these two ethernet cards, using the sky2 driver:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2013 10:54 am Post subject:

I might try that, thanks for the hint.
I have posted to the iommu kernel mailing list, so I'll see if they have any hints.

I saw it originally on 3.4.10, then upgraded 3.4.34, then 3.8.1.
The add in card has been working without a problem, though it's a older rev of the onboard chipset.
Not sure if IOMMU is to blame, the drivers or some combination.

Again thanks
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Mar 06, 2013 7:04 pm Post subject:

I think it might be solved.
(tip of the hat to s4e8) though it's iommu=pt (not pv)

At least my sound is now working.

So I'm going to mark this as solved.

Note: Not sure why but I thought that the "pt" option was for intel cpus/motherboards.

I will check on whether the ethernet is fixed with this option at another time, will be marking this solved.

Anyway thanks to all for all the hints.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Thu Mar 28, 2013 9:48 am Post subject:

Update: the ethernet is working perfectly fine with iommu=pt being passed on the boot line.

I've got a second video card passing through to my kvm guests
and I pass through the addon ethernet while using the onboard for the linux host.
_________________
UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

chithanh · Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2014 7:26 pm Post subject:

For reference, this is the kernel bug report:

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14962