bnxtnet Driver Recovery and Firmware Crash

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

•  The vmkernel.log on ESXi host actively reports asynchronous hot reset events initiated by the bnxtnet driver:
  
vmkernel: bnxtnet: bnxtnet_handle_hot_reset:#####: [vmnic0] Hot reset async evt: evt_data1 = 0####, min wait time = 1300 ms, max wait time = 6200 ms vmkernel:

bnxtnet: bnxtnet_handle_hot_reset:#####: [vmnic1] Hot reset async evt: evt_data1 = 0#####, min wait time = 1300 ms, max wait time = 6200 ms
  
  
• This may or may not be accompanied by (NIC) link state down events.

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

The bnxtnet driver is triggering an error recovery process (bnxtnet_handle_hot_reset) in response to a firmware crash. One possible reason behind firmware crash is incompatibility between the physical NIC firmware version and the NIC driver version.

Resolution

 

• Identify the current bnxtnet driver version and the applied physical NIC firmware version on the affected ESXi host.

• Validate the driver and firmware combination against the Broadcom Compatibility Guide. This can be verified at below link:
  
  Broadcom Compatibility Guide for IO Devices

• If the current firmware version is not validated for the installed driver version, update the NIC firmware to a supported release.

 

Additional Information

Japanese version of this KB : https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/436408