v1.06 -- transmit timeouts again

[Tom Eastep]

Ossama Othman wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We are able to _consistently_ reproduce transmit timeouts in our
> eepro100.  The driver version is "eepro100.c:v1.06 10/16/98" from a
> 2.2.5 Linux kernel.
> 
> Here are some log messages:
> 
> eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0000 at 24762714/24762730 command 00020000.
> eth0: Trying to restart the transmitter...
> eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0000 at 24762730/24762746 command 000c0000.
> eth0: Trying to restart the transmitter...
> eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0000 at 24763766/24763782 command 00020000.
> eth0: Trying to restart the transmitter...
> eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0000 at 24763782/24763798 command 000c0000.
> 
> Our hardware:
> 
>         - Dell PowerEdge 6300 Server
>                 400 MHz Quad CPU Pentium II Xeon (512KB Cache each)
>                 1 GB RAM
>                 eepro100 card (running at 100 MBps)
> 
> The kernel is compiled with SMP support.
> 
I have a related problem. With two eepro100 cards and SMP, I see the
symptoms that you describe within minutes to hours after booting.

The log messages report problems on one of the cards and the only remedy
is to unload and reload the eepro100 module (reboot with a monolithic
kernel). I've also found that after downing the interface reported in
the log messages, the other interface is broken (although it is usually
silent wrt log messages) until I down the second interface and
unload/reload the module. The only SMP configuration that I've found
that works is with a single eepro100 card and an ISA NE2000 clone. I've
tried an eepro100 with other PCI cards with poor success.

The most common suggestion is to add 

	alias eth0 eepro100
	options eepro100 multicast_filter_limit=3
	
to /etc/conf.modules.

In my case, this seems to have no effect. In fact, I've patched
eepro100.c to set 'multicast_filter_limit' to 3 and still see the
problem.

-Tom
-- 
Tom Eastep
Compaq Computer Corporation
Enterprise Computing Group
Tandem Division
tom.eastep@compaq.com