"Transmit timed out" with EtherExpress Pro100B

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Serguei Koubouchine wrote:

> The eepro100 driver is BUGGY. Unfortunately enough, Donald Becker seems to
> consider it being top quality, so we don't have any hope to get those
> adapters work in our machines :-( The old driver included in the kernel
> trees does work with any number of multicast filters provided this number is
> one... Donald's recipe for the driver is "Don't use gated", which does
> effectively mean "Don't use eepro100 at all"... All bug reports sent to
> Donald seem to go to /dev/null - no answer, no reaction at all :-(
> 
> So being a realist I'd suggest everybody to forget about eepro100 existance
> at all...

Oooo, brutal!  I have to say that I use the eepro100 in (16) Dell
poweredge 2300's and just benchmarked them full duplex through a switch
at 95.6 Mbps (data only) or 98.5% of wire speed, accounting for the
headers.  This is going both ways at once, so the aggregate bandwidth
was 191 Mbps.  The network is stable enough that several of the systems
were up for months diskless (while awaiting a functioning aic7xxx).

The difficulties experienced on a poweredge 2300 could easily come from
a mixture of a kernel swap/mmap bug, the aic7xxx 7890 driver (which is
still pre-release, after all) and the eepro100.  I don't deny that there
are likely some problems in the driver and I'm sure Donald is aware of
them, but most of the problems that are left very likely multiple layers
of the system, and not just the drivers themselves.  You also have to be
aware that Don tries to make the same drivers function on all linux/PCI
architectures, which makes debugging them even harder.

I personally think that it is a miracle that Don maintains basically all
the ethernet drivers in use in Linux today, and if he can only do so by
being conservative and by trying to share the largest amount possible of
internal code, then it is a small price to pay.

And let us not forget -- each and every one of us has the source.  If
there is a feature you would like to see added, or a bug you would like
to squash, feel free!  I've tried to help Don out in the past (sometimes
usefully, sometimes not:-) and I know he is very receptive to outside
contributions and bug fixes.  It's not like we're paying him for help so
we should feel entitled to receive it...although I personally plan to
buy him a beer the first chance I get!

   rgb

Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb@phy.duke.edu