How is BSD's Broadcom support?

[Jayce]

I'm running FreeNAS on a box with a Broadcom wired card. I was having some issues transferring data from my Ubuntu 11.04 system running an Atheros wired card. I'm using CIFS as the transmission means.

Every now and then when I click on my already mounted CIFS share in Ubuntu/Nautilus, I would get one of two errors.

Error: No data available. Please switch to a different viewer and try again.
or
Error: Invalid Argument.

This has happened when the box was at idle as well as in the middle of full bore backups. Since I was running Ubuntu to Ubuntu before on CIFS, blaming Ubuntu for the error I didn't think made sense. Likewise, NOBODY of the FreeNAS community (developers included) heard of any consistent complaints about CIFS with FreeNAS 8.

Some further review revealed that I have a Broadcom card, which just screams "suck" no matter which OS you're on. I've had major headaches with them - even wired cards on Windows.

So I ask the few BSD members that roam this board:

1 - How is Broadcom support in BSD? Is it likely that my issue is due to a Broadcom card?
2 - Can you think of any other reasons that might be causing this issue?

Thanks!

 

[MindoverMaster]

Wasn't Broadcom the worst card for Linux? As for BSD, I'm not sure.

 

[Jayce]

Wasn't Broadcom the worst card for Linux? As for BSD, I'm not sure.

Broadcom is the worst card to go with period. I've had just as many issues with them in Windows as I've had with Linux. My wireless issues were magically cured instantly by dropping in a 12 dollar Intel wireless card in every Linux laptop I've used.

But the catch here is I would THINK a wired Broadcom card might have enough support to not suck badly. However, the one developer of FreeNAS just got back to me and noted "Broadcom and BSD = bad combination."

He also said if I run tcpdump during a transfer I'll be able to see if it's the NIC causing the issue, so I'll try to do that when transferring a few gigabytes of data and see where it tanks.

 

[Kharn]

1) It's about the same possibly a little better than linux.
2) Could be a craptacular driver, what broadcom is it?

 

[aikbix]

Broadcom has gotten a lot better recently for Linux users. I believe some of the specs have been opened up within the last year or so. It really depends on what card you are using.

 

[Jayce]

Well, Broadcom wasn't the issue in this case. I got the same results with 3Com PCI network card as well. I thought it was my viewer, perhaps. So I tried 4 different ones. Thunar, PCMan, Dolphin, and Nautilus - all same issue. I went into the Samba IRC chat and some Samba developers walked me through some steps. They came to conclude it was a bug, but they weren't sure if it was an actual Samba bug.

A bit later I ended up coming across an old bug posted on Launchpad with Ubuntu in regard to some user with a FreeNAS server that was unable to save more than 627 files to his CIFS share. I was able to duplicate the results, except I was not able to duplicate 627. My magic number was 575.

FreeNAS w/ CIFS was fine with 574 files, but once I put that magic 575th file on it began to send me invalid arguments. I tried the exact same scenario except using a Linux file server (Ubuntu, in fact, along with CIFS as well) and I was not able to duplicate the results. Thousands of files later, it was still trucking along.

ZFS under FreeNAS/BSD may be pretty sexy, but I can't work under that limitation. I'm back to using Linux for my file server.

 

[Kharn]

Jayce, just out of interest can you post up the error's I have never seen this problem before.

 

[Jayce]

Jayce, just out of interest can you post up the error's I have never seen this problem before.

The error is simply invalid argument. Sometimes it says nothing more, nothing less, other times it says to use a different viewer, which is why I tried Dolphin, Thunar, PCMan, etc. I've been able to write more files to the share, but it's re-mounting it that it tanks on me. So after many exhausting efforts of mounting/re-mounting after copying files over in batches of 5, I narrowed it down to the magic number I spoke about above. I'm as confused as anybody else would be. Why would that threshold matter?

I also thought it was a .gvfs problem on the Linux side, but due to what commands the Samba developers told me to run, they said it bypasses .gvfs all together, so since it failed for me in terminal with their commands they knew .gvfs was not an issue. Likewise, Linux to Linux does not exhibit this issue whatsoever. I actually dozed off during my test run and woke up to see I had written thousands of files to the share without axing the transfer. But it worked upon re-mounting it so I knew it wasn't necessarily a CIFS issue either.

I also set up FreeNAS 8 with a UFS drive yesterday and had the same issue. So it's not a file system problem against ZFS at all. I have tried so many combinations and many hours of troubleshooting to come up with this: It's a FreeNAS 8 problem. I didn't have the issue with FreeNAS 0.7.2.

In FreeNAS's defense, a lot of people say version 8 was more of a beta than anything else. Tons of users are waiting until 8.1 to use it in production. I'm just tired of waiting so that's why I went back. Plus there's a lot of drama going on in that community... Tension between 0.7 developers versus devs working on version 8 (somehow they're almost a fork of one another), throw in some IXSystems developers on version 8 and the rumor of making a "pro 8 paid version"... couple that with Illumos trying to get off the ground and mimic OpenSolaris since Oracle sucks at life and tanked it, along with trying to support Open ZFS for the future, etc. I just decided to KISS (keep it simple stupid) and use what I already know and what I feel is future proof.

This reminds me, my newbie-registration time should be up by now so I can file this bug to FreeNAS... hrmmm...