Prevent Intel 82574 NICs from going offline

SUMMARY

Prevent Intel 82574 NICs from going offline

ISSUE

Purpose

Prevent Intel 82574 NICs from going offline

Description

Some Unitrends systems, like R813, have Intel 82574 NICs which are vulnerable to certain ASPM faults which will cause the NIC to stop working and accumulate errors. 

Below are typical symptoms when this occurs.

# lspci |grep Eth

04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82574L Gigabit Network Connection (rev ff)

# ifconfig eth0

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:25:90:C7:41:AF

          inet addr:192.168.134.51  Bcast:192.168.134.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

          inet6 addr: fe80::225:90ff:fec7:41af/64 Scope:Link

          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1

          RX packets:215 errors:747324309330 dropped:124554051555 overruns:0 frame:498216206220

          TX packets:38 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

          RX bytes:26075 (25.4 KiB)  TX bytes:5512 (5.3 KiB)

          Interrupt:17 Memory:fb6e0000-fb700000



# ethtool -i eth0

driver: e1000e

version: 2.3.2-k

firmware-version: 1.9-0

bus-info: 0000:05:00.0

supports-statistics: yes

supports-test: yes

supports-eeprom-access: yes

supports-register-dump: yes

supports-priv-flags: no

Cause

The Intel 82574 NICs are vulnerable to certain ASPM faults with the Linux e1000e 2.1.4 or greater driver. 

Resolution

If you have unitrends-drivers-2.6.32_279.el6.x86_64-2014011025.x86_64 or later from release 7.4.0, this should already be resolved, unless you have added a NIC card with 82574s after installing it. 

If you are experiencing this problem with the symptoms above, it can be resolved as follows: 

1)   Download the nic82574.sh script

wget ftp://ftp.unitrends.com/support/scripts/nic82574.sh

2)   Run the script to patch the NIC EEPROM and set a kernel parameter to avoid the problem. 

sh nic32574.sh

3)   Reboot

Third-Party Sources

http://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/files/e1000e%20stable/eeprom_fix_82574_or_82583/ where Intel says it can be fixed with an EEPROM bit change via a Linux shellscript.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=632650  reports an important change in e1000e 2.1.4 and later around ASPM.  The user resolution was to set

’pcie_aspm=off’ in the kernel params.