Bug 200026

Summary:	[vmware] em driver reports "Watchdog timeout -- resetting" on vmware ESXi
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	Nick Hilliard <nick>
Component:	kern	Assignee:	freebsd-virtualization (Nobody) <virtualization>
Status:	New ---
Severity:	Affects Some People	CC:	agotsis, dpetrov67
Priority:	---
Version:	10.1-RELEASE
Hardware:	amd64
OS:	Any

Description Nick Hilliard 2015-05-07 12:43:50 UTC

the freebsd em driver periodically hangs when running in a VM on all versions of esxi after (but not including) build 799733 (ESXi 5.0 GA).  The symptoms of the problem are that the freebsd vm drops traffic on the affected interface for a period of time.  The kernel reports errors:

Apr 22 19:12:08 xxxx kernel: em0: Watchdog timeout -- resetting
Apr 25 07:38:18 xxxx kernel: em0: Watchdog timeout -- resetting
Apr 27 23:29:35 xxxx kernel: em1: Watchdog timeout -- resetting
Apr 29 18:03:29 xxxx kernel: em1: Watchdog timeout -- resetting
May  5 05:28:38 xxxx kernel: em1: Watchdog timeout -- resetting

FreeBSD 8/9 were particularly badly affected by this, to the point that the em driver was totally unusable on those versions when running as vm after esxi build 799733, i.e ~30% packet loss for pings.  The intel em driver update in 10.0 helped quite a bit, and anecdotally the problem seems to be less bad on ESXi 6.0.  Now the figure seems to be down at around 1-2% pktloss over extended periods of time.

However it's still there on 10.1 with all recent versions of esxi, and prevents freebsd from being able to function properly as a router when using the em interface.

The problem also affects freebsd derivatives (e.g. some versions of JunOS Firefly / vRR / vMX, etc).

Comment 1 Mark Linimon freebsd_committer

2021-05-14 12:02:02 UTC

^Triage: correct assignment.  Discussed with: koobs@.

Comment 2 agotsis 2022-08-18 17:49:55 UTC

I realize that this bug is very old.

Does the bug still occur? If so, which virtual NIC is used? Can a vmware.log. vmx configuration file and vmkernel.log be provided?

Thanks!

Comment 3 Nick Hilliard 2022-08-19 20:37:10 UTC

sorry, haven't checked in some years and I don't have an esxi installation where I can easily install freebsd to check it.

This specific problem affected the freebsd em driver only, not the vmx driver (which had a different set of problems on the esxi platform - see bug #198406)