[eepro100] (no subject)

[Chris Jones]

I've been using an Intel Pro/100+ NIC for a number of months now with 
very few problems, but recently it's been doing very strange things.

I've tried the stock kernel driver (this is the one I've been using for
months), Intel's e100.o driver and I tried to use the Scyld driver, but
had some problems compiling it (it compiled stand-a-lone, but gave 
numerous missing symbols when I tried to insmod it - including printk? 
How? ;)

The problem is basically that it seems to be unable to cope with 
sustained traffic. I can burst traffic fine, so things like IRC and web
browsing work fairly well, but anything like smb/nfs that tries to move
a large amount of data works for about a second, which I assume is the
initial data burst, then it completely ceases moving any data and the
controlling app enters the D state (although dropping the interface
eventually causes the sleeping processes to timeout and die).

Initially the card was sharing an IRQ with a GeForce graphics card,
figuring this might be the problem I moved the NIC to a PCI slot that
only shares an IRQ with the USB controller, but I don't load any drivers
for that (or do I actually need to disable the USB controller in the
BIOS to truly stop the IRQ sharing?)

My machine has recently changed from a dual celeron system on an ABit
BP6 to a single Duron on an ABit KT7-RAID, but the entire kernel has
been rebuilt from scratch without SMP.

This is the initialisation message the eepro100 driver produces:

eth0: Intel Corporation 82557 [Ethernet Pro 100], 00:90:27:94:21:CA, IRQ 11.
 Board assembly 721383-006, 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 (0x04f4518b).

What can I do to try and track this problem down? I've set the debug
module parameter to 8, but it doesn't seem to produce any extra output.

Thanks for your help,
-- 
Chris "Ng" Jones
  chris@black-sun.co.uk
  www.linuxdude.co.uk