[Xen-users] GPL PV Intermitent Network Problems

["Nick Couchman" <Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well, I seem to have developed a strange issue with the GPL PV drivers in Windows.  I'm running Xen 3.2 on SLES 10 SP2 and running some Windows XP HVM domUs.  Most (12-15) of my Windows machines work just fine.  Two of them, though, have started exhibiting a strange behavior with intermittent network connectivity.  Basically, the network starts up and connects initially.  After some random amount of time that varies in between reboots, it quits working - doesn't respond to pings and isn't able to get access to any network resources at all - cannot ping out, access web sites, etc.  If I disable the card and re-enabled, sometimes it will start working, sometimes it will fail to pick up a DHCP address, etc.  If it does start working, it only works for a limited amount of time (sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 5 minutes) and quits working again.

If I run tcpdump on the dom0 bridge it's using or on the dom0 interface for the domU (e.g. vif87.0 where 87 is the number of the running domU), I see ARP requests from hosts for the IP address of the system, but the domU doesn't seem to respond to those requests - there are never any packets coming out of the domU.  I can also see ICMP echo requests to the host, but no responses.  If I try to ping out from the domU, I don't see any packets at all - no ARP requests, no ICMP echo requests, etc.

Has anyone seen this behavior before?  I'm working on getting both Windows debugging setup and trying to run tcpdump (or something similar) inside the Windows HVM domU to try to capture what it thinks is happening.  There don't appear to be any correlating events for the network card either working or failing to work in the dom0 log files, dmesg, xm dmesg, or xm log.  I see the following message in the qemu-dm-<id>.log file, but don't know if it's related or not:

I/O request not ready: 0, ptr: 0, port: 0, data: 0, count: 0, size: 0

Also, sometimes it seems to be related to whether or not I'm doing something with the VM.  For example, last time I tried it, pings were responding fine until I moved my mouse into the VM and then it quit working.  IRQ conflict, maybe - the network card seems to have used IRQ 5??

Thanks - Nick

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