Re: e1000e driver Network Card Detected Hardware Unit Hang
In days of yore (Mon, 15 Apr 2024), Jamie thus quoth:
> So there is a very nasty bug in the e1000e network card
> driver.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005480/ethernet-products.html
notes that MSI interrupts may be problematic on some systems. Worth
digging into whether that is an issue on this system of yours.
I am not sure Debian can resolve this problem with the driver, but
upstream kernel folks might. Unsure whether Intel still helps maintain
this driver as it is quite old (I dealt with support issues on this driver
some 15-16 years ago).
The Intel page states this is upstream kernel only at this point, so going
to SourceForge for their out-of-tree driver is no longer an option.
> I am running Debian 12 Bookworm.
>
> You will get the message "Detected Hardware Unit Hang" and then
> the network card just stops working.
[snip]
> This is a gigabit network card as I said it is a built in NIC I believe it
> is an Intel NIC.
It is an Intel NIC. Most of the NIC drivers beginning with an 'e' followed
by numbers are Intel as far as I know. These NICs were very common as
on-board NICs in OEM systems as Intel provided them in large volumes. They
are not the best, but they usually do their job.
[snip]
> This seems to happen when you are actually pushing a bit of traffic
> though it not a lot but just even a little bit. It isn't network overload
> or anything I am barely doing anything really but it will do this.
If it is a hardware hang, it may be the NIC firmware getting its knickers
in a twist, and that is not something the kernel or the driver can do much
about.
> I have already tried the following
>
> ethtool -K eth1 tx off rx off
> ethtool -K eth1 tso off gso off
> ethtool -K eth1 gso off gro off tso off tx off rx off rxvlan off txvlan
> off sg off
All worthwhile things to try. You can also try reducing the RX buffers
from the default 4096 to 2048 if you are not running a lot of traffic. It
might not help, but worth trying.
> I have disabled all power management in the bios as well including the one
> for ASPM
>
> I added the following to grub
>
> pcie_aspm=off e1000e.SmartPowerDownEnable=0
>
>
> This is in /etc/default/grub
> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet pcie_aspm=off
> e1000e.SmartPowerDownEnable=0"
Good thinking about power management. :)
> Then I did an update-grub as well.
>
> None of this has worked in fixing this problem. I am still getting the
> same issue.
Best bet at this point would be to scout the Linux Kernel Mailing List
archives to see if anyone else have run into the same problems, and then
reviewing the kernel maintainers list to find someone that works on the
e1000e driver to strike up a direct dialogue with them.
> Can you please fix this issue this is a really nasty problem with Debian
> 12 (Bookworm)
>
> I am seeing this being reported back in Kernel 5.3.x but i am not seeing any
> reports for 6.1.x about this issue.
>
> Debian Bug report logs - #945912
> Kernel 5.3 e100e Detected Hardware Unit Hang
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=945912
If it has been reported before and is still present now, one of two things
is likely true.
1) the problem was intermittent and could not be reliably reproduced in
order to debug and resolve
2) the problem was related to the hardware itself, and there was no way
to fix it in either driver or firmware
It has been known to happen that drivers implement workarounds for issues
in the hardware itself, so that hardware bugs do not get tripped (or are
tripped less often).
> Please reply back and confirm that you got this email and that you are
> looking into this problem please.
To state the obvious, I am not a kernel maintainer for Debian and do not
speak on behalf of the Debian project.
I work for a Linux company you may have heard of and have done so for
almost eighteen years, a decade of which was in support. 15 years ago, I
know exactly who I would have gone to to look into this problem, but he
now works for Broadcom and probably has forgotten all about the
e1000/e1000e drivers.
Upstream driver maintainer would be the best bet IMHO. If this driver is
community support only (i.e. if Intel no longer participates in driver
maintenance), I would say that all bets are off.
With only one datapoint - your system and your NIC, it is not possible to
rule out that the NIC itself is bad. :-/
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/S
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