Re: August 2026 stabilization week

On Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:38:25 -0700
Gleb Smirnoff <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 26, 2026 at 08:30:02PM +0200, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> A> Am 2026-08-26 19:49, schrieb Gleb Smirnoff:
> A> > On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 10:22:02AM -0700, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
> A> > T> My personal testing on a SOHO router, Intel video laptop and nVidia
> A> > video
> A> > T> desktop also didn't find any regressions.
> A> > 
> A> > Update.  My SOHO router actually has a minor regression with Intel
> A> > NICs:
> A> > 
> A> > igb0: Watchdog timeout (TX: 0 desc avail: 979 pidx: 106) -- resetting
> A> > igb0: link state changed to DOWN
> A> > igb0: link state changed to UP
> A> > igb1: Watchdog timeout (TX: 7 desc avail: 980 pidx: 543) -- resetting
> A> > igb1: link state changed to DOWN
> A> > igb1: link state changed to UP
> A> > 
> A> > This never happened on this machine for 10 years.  It is just a single
> A> > link loss for ~ 24 hours, but the traffic on this router is really
> A> > minimal.
> A> 
> A> The watchdog was not working for years. Commit
> A> https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=69c3e0de01c1938792d319f18ba0a9ffa60dfa96
> A> restores the functionality.
> A> 
> A> net.iflib.timer_default is 4 by default (that's number of timer intervals).
> A> If your hardware delays the update of the state longer than that, you can
> A> increase that value. I have one slow and old hardware which needs the kick
> A> by the watchdog, and the setting was tuned on that. Your more modern
> A> hardware (igb should be way more modern than what this was tuned on) should
> A> complete that stuff much faster, so the initial expectation is, that there
> A> really is an issue.
> 
> What have happened before?  The watchdog wasn't working for years, but the NIC
> seemed to perform alright without it.  To be fair, this is very lightly loaded
> machine without any precise monitoring, so it could be there were some network
> lags that were not logged anywhere and if I experienced them in an interactive
> sessions, I attributed to the rest of the Internet.  So, to put it short what
> were the symptoms before the 69c3e0de01c1?
> 
> -- 
> Gleb Smirnoff

Just a prediction, but usually in cases something was working but
watchdog fires once configured are:
  *Worked slowly that need more time than configured watchdog timeout.
Or
  *Worked but quite heavy-loaded that cannot have time to reset
   watchdog timeouts.

In both cases, assuming it's actually working fine, the workaround
would be to increase watchdog timeout value to meet actual demands.

Regards.

-- 
Tomoaki AOKI    <[email protected]>