How to reproduce: Trying to install new 13.0-RELEASE vm on vmware 5.5 using disc ISO: - VM is configured for 16GB, 4 cores, 2 vmxnet3 interfaces - installer starts from ISO: - configure auto-ZFS - change swap to 16GB - select stripe on the single disk (da0) - confirm and let the installer set up the disk - when the network installer starts and asks whether to configure vmx0: - configure ipv4 - configure using DHCP => VM reboots, no panic, no additional information. Console window goes black and the VM eventually reboots. I don't see any error in vmware either When I try the same process using 2 E1000 interfaces, it works fine.
Just tried to add a vmxnet3 interface to the new VM that was configured with 2 E1000 interfaces. As soon as I do ifconfig vmx0 up the whole VM resets, no panic string. I started the VM with verbose flag on, no change.
It looks like you are hitting a bug in vmware. I recall having a similar issue with 5.5 U1. Try upgrading to the latest patch version or a newer version altogether.
You may want to check if dev.vmx.0.iflib.disable_msix=0 works as a workaround.
(In reply to Andriy Gapon from comment #3) No, this doesn't work (same crash), and I'm on the last 5.5 version. Can't upgrade due to license issues. I've just found: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D22819 If I revert this and boot with the release-kernel minus this change, vmx works fine. How can I achieve the same result without patching the kernel?
Another option is to disable MSI-X for the network interface in the VMWare configuration. There is (possibly undocumented) configuration option ethernet%d.intrMode. It can be set to 2 to enable MSI interrupts or to 1 to enable legacy interrupts only. In any case, a VMWare crash is a VMWare bug. It should not crash no matter what a guest does.
I was hit by this. I also can't upgrade from esxi 5.5. Just wanted to say that setting ethernet0.intrMode to 2 has stopped my vms from crashing when dhclient runs. I don't know what the performance impact is, but I'm hoping it's less than switching to E1000 interfaces would be.
For posterity, in comment #3 I suggested incorrect value for the tunable resulting in a double negation. The suggestion should be to set dev.vmx.0.iflib.disable_msix=1 in /boot/loader.conf.
Also interesting that pre-iflib vmxnet3 driver does not seem to hit this problem even when MSI-X is enabled and used (and the blacklist is disabled).
^Triage: I'm sorry that this PR did not get addressed in a timely fashion. By now, the version that it was created against is out of support. Please re-open if it is still a problem on a supported version.