dual PII hang recover methods?

Scott Stone sstone@turbolinux.com
Mon Dec 14 19:26:30 1998


On Mon, 14 Dec 1998, Jerry O'Keefe wrote:

> I have a dual Pentium Intel DK440LX motherboard running RedHat.
> Under heavy network load, after many hours, the ethernet driver will
> die. I think this is a known problem. The driver is eepro100 version
> 1.05 and the kernel is a monolithic build of version 2.0.30.
> We donot see this problem when the DK440LX has only one Pentium
> installed. 
> 
>  When the driver dies, we will see either a SMP or a Tx timeout error 
> message just before it dies, but the message alone does not
> guarantee the driver is down.
> 
> What is the best way to detect and recover from this problem?
> 
> 1. Is there any way to test that the ethernet driver is
> working correctly? Maybe some ioctl call?
> We tried pinging the driver's port with its IP address, but it still
> responds when the driver is known to be down.
> 
> 2. Should building the driver as a module and when
>    the driver dies unload, reload and restart the driver work?
> 
> 3. Should we try a 2.1 kernel?

My dual ppro-200 with an eepro100 in it runs forever with a monolithic
2.0.30 kernel... try using the 0.36 eepro100 driver - that's what I'm
using, and it works.. surprisingly.

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@pht.com, sstone@pht.co.jp>
Head of TurboLinux Development/Systems Administrator
Pacific HiTech, Inc (USA) / Pacific HiTech, KK (Japan)