Becker's eepro100 or Intel's e100 driver for Linux 2.2?

Mon Feb 28 15:05:12 2000

Got the infamous "Transmit timed out" and "restart the
transmitter" issue with both Becker's eepro100 1.06 and 1.09l
drivers, under both kernel 2.2.10ac12 (long story ;-) and
2.2.12-20 (updated 2.2.12 in stock RedHat 6.1, although my system
is the base RedHat 6.0 with those few updates now). Although the
2.2.12-20 kernel + 1.09l eepro100 combo reduced the occurances,
they still would creep up in increasing number the longer the
system is up. 

I tried various options (fixed to 100FD with options=48,
max_interrupt_work=40, multicast_filter_limit=3 or even =0) which
did help, but the same result would occur eventually (although less
frequently). I could and would stop, reload and start the network
regularly which also helped (thank God for Linux's uptime and lack
of reboots), but the transmit errors would eventually return and
reduce performance.  I played with this all weekend.

We are a TCP/IP-only network, but we have a massive load on our
server (a PIII-500, 1GB, all kinds of apps,
Samba/NFS/CVS/Sendmail/etc...), which seems to handle it fine
except for this. For now, I have yanked the EEPro/100+ (i82558
chip) out of my server and replaced it with a cheapo Linksys
LNE100TX (DEC Tulip-variant) which actually is performing better
since the transmit errors are no longer a factor. 

Again, this is the "infamous" issue with Linux 2.2 and eepro100. 

I noticed that Intel has its own Linux 2.2 driver for newer
Pro/100+ cards. Not as expansive as Becker's (e.g., his supports
the 100B/i82557, whereas Intel's does not), but I check and my
card is supported (689661-004 / i82558 chip). 

Has anyone done any comparisons between Intel's e100.c driver and
Becker's eepro100.c driver?  I'd prefer to stick with Becker's
driver since I've had no other problems with his drivers with any
other chipsets, let alone the fact that it is probably in more
widespread use than Intel's, but I wanted to make sure.

Thanx in advance ... 

-- Bryan J. Smith
   Theseus Logic

P.S.  Given the load on this system, I was considering looking at
going Gigabit Ethernet from this server to my switch fabric.  Any
comments?  Any recommendations on a Gigabit card?  I see there are
two Open Source drivers, plus Intel's own Gigabit card and its own
driver.

-- 
 Bryan "TheBS" Smith -- Engineer, IT Professional and Hacker
      E-mail:  mailto:thebs@theseus.com,b.j.smith@ieee.org
  Disclaimer:  http://www.SmithConcepts.com/legal.html
*************************************************************
  TheBS ... Serving E-mail filters to /dev/null since 1989

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