Intel Etherexpress Pro 10/100 "transmit timed out"

[Brian Leeper]

I'm having a problem with an on-board Intel Etherexpress. Driver output at
bootup is(from kernel 2.2.10):

eth0: Intel EtherExpress Pro 10/100 at 0xfcc0, 00:A0:C9:ED:81:21, IRQ 10.
  Board assembly 677173-001, Physical connectors present: RJ45
  Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
  General self-test: passed.
  Serial sub-system self-test: passed.
  Internal registers self-test: passed.
  ROM checksum self-test: passed (0x24c9f043).
  Receiver lock-up workaround activated.

Every so often I'll get a bunch of these errors, which render the machine
unreachable and continue until someone reboots the machine(these are from 
when the machine was runnin 2.2.10 with the stock eepro100.c driver):

Sep 29 21:08:08 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0090 at 
113620095/113620110 command 000c0000. 
Sep 29 21:08:08 linux325 kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the
transmitter... 
Sep 29 21:08:13 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0090 at 
113620095/113620110 command 000c0000. 
Sep 29 21:08:13 linux325 kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the
transmitter... 
Sep 29 21:08:18 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0090 at 
113620095/113620110 command 000c0000. 
Sep 29 21:08:18 linux325 kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the
transmitter... 
Sep 29 21:08:23 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0090 at 
113620095/113620110 command 000c0000. 

Sometimes I also get:


Oct  4 12:27:01 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0090
0080 at 
12314932/12314948 command 000c0000. 
Oct  4 12:27:06 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0090
0080 at 
12314932/12314948 command 000c0000. 


I tried upgrading to the latest driver, eepro100.c:v1.09l 8/7/99 and got
the following messages almost immediatly after booting up from the kernel
I compiled with the new driver (2.2.11):

Oct  4 16:57:15 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0070 at 
5084/5096 command 000c0000. 
Oct  4 16:57:15 linux325 kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the
transmitter... 
Oct  4 16:57:19 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050
0000 at 
5213/5226 command 000c0000. 
Oct  4 16:57:19 linux325 kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the
transmitter... 

So I gave up on that and went to 2.2.11 with the stock eepro100.c driver,
with  multicast_filter_limit = 0 -- I still got the following errors, and
the machine had to be rebooted to restore network connectivity:


Oct  4 23:13:06 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0090
0000 at 
8817044/8817058 command 000ca000. 
Oct  4 23:13:16 linux325 kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0090
0080 at 
8817045/8817059 command 000c0000. 

The machine is plugged into a Cisco Catalyst 5000 using 10mb half-duplex.

Any suggestions as to what I could do or test to solve this problem would
be appreciated.


Brian Leeper	Unix Systems Engineer
digitalNATION, Inc - a Verio company    http://www.dn.net
v 703-642-2800  f 703-642-0261