"bnx2x 0000:01;00.2 eth2: MDC/MDIO access timeout” on network start

[Richard Berg]

Hello,

I have a Dell R630 with a "Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM57800 1/10 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 1)" network card that when networking starts or I run dhclient on it starts printing the error "bnx2x 0000:01;00.2 eth2: MDC/MDIO access timeout” several times a second until I 'ifconfig down' the device.

I am running 12.04.5 Precise with the hardware enablement stack with kernel version 3.13.0-53-generic. During debugging I upgraded all firmware.

I found that if I load the 3.19 kernel and linux-firmware package from Vivid this NIC works correctly.

lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS
Release: 12.04

apt-cache policy linux-image-generic-lts-trusty
linux-image-generic-lts-trusty:
Installed: 3.13.0.53.46
Candidate: 3.13.0.53.46

Expected: I expected this NIC to request a dhcp IP
Happened: Errors to console and dmesg log

Thanks!

[Syd Logan (slogan-r)]

Seeing this as well with Ubuntu 14.04 - at boot time, same Dell HW.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Richard Berg (rberg)]

Hello, I forgot to update this ticket.
This NIC arrived with a newer firmware version then the others I have used.

for now I have been downgrading this NIC to firmware-version: FFV7.10.18, with file "Network_Firmware_NF92Y_LN_7.10.18.BIN" from Dell. 7.10.18 was the last version I could find that worked correctly. Hope this helps.

[Syd Logan (slogan-r)]

Do you have a link to how to perform this downgrade, I'm sort of new to this world and some instructions on how to update the blades would be useful.

Thanks!

[AlexWBaule (alexwbaule)]

The Dowgrade version is here:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/ph/en/phbiz1/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=NF92Y

donwloaded this bin file, chmod 755 and execute.