Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

Issues fixed in this patch (and their relevant symptoms, if applicable) include:

• This bulletin updates the VMware ESX 4.0 NetXen device driver to version 4.0.301-2vmw.
• When the NetXen NX3031 NIC resides on a relatively high memory location (possibly above 512GB), the system becomes unresponsive as it tries to access an address that is out of range. For example, this issue might occur if the system has a physical memory of 96GB but the memory map configuration generates addresses beyond the 512GB memory location.
  
  A message similar to the following is logged before the system becomes unresponsive:
  <3>nommu_map_single: overflow a31407ad5a+54 of device mask 7fffffffff
  
  The following is an example of a backtrace of this issue:
  0x4100c00e7338:[0x41801d1984bf]nommu_map_single+0x4e stack: 0x0
  0x4100c00e7598:[0x41801d26f745]unm_nic_xmit_frame+0x4d8 stack: 0x4100c00e75c8
  0x4100c00e7688:[0x41801d1a1609]process_tx_queue+0x874 stack: 0x41000b884600
• The issue is mostly seen on HP branded NetXen cards, such as NC375T. Both the esxcfg-nics -l command (supported on ESX) and the vSphere Client fail to display some ports on Quad port 1G NICs. These NetXen devices/ports are recognized by the hardware and are listed with the lspci command (supported on ESX). However, the driver fails to create or probe some ports.

Deployment Considerations

None beyond the required patch bundles and reboot information listed in the table above.

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware vCenter Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX 4.0 hosts.

To update ESX 4.0 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the patch zip file from http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/download/ and install the bulletin using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX 4 Patch Management Guide.