a switch died with error "nf2: no available transmit/recieve buffers"

[pardis]

One of our Netfpgas cards died last night. We noticed that the nf2 table is filled with all 1s. Then we noticed that the port lights don't turn on anymore. We tried to reboot the machine and load it with a bit file again. While rebooting the machine, we noticed an error message " nf2: no available transmit/receive buffers."which seems to be generated from the kernel module. No matter how much we tried to load it again with a bitfile, the lights did not turn on and the card was not functioning at all.

[pardis]

"nf2: no available transmit/receive buffers."

[grg]

Sounds like the NetFPGA board reset during operation. Results in all registers returning 0xFFFFFFFF until the BARs are reprogrammed.

Adam is currently following this up with Pardis.

[grg]

Setting to "wontfix" as it is most likely a bad card.

Will reopen if the same symptoms are seen again.

[ssugrim]

Did we ever learn any thing more about this? I'm now experiencing the same issue with a new netfpga Installation. Do we know the conditions under which such a failure can occur?

[grg]

Not a bug with OpenFlow?. (NetFPGA-related issue that has been resolved.)

Follow up from James at Rutgers:

After some extensive debugging we determined the problem was we were using a version 2.1 rev 2 card in the rack mount server. Apparently version 2.1 rev 2 card only work in the cube. If used in a rack mount machine the cards reset after being programmed. The rack mount machines required version 2.1 rev 3 card.