[eepro100] Addressing "eth0: card reports no resources."

[Louis Mandelstam]

Hello,

We've been seeing the above message in the logs of our proxy servers.  The
servers run 2.2.16 with a number of patches, mostly similar to Red Hat
Rawhide's kernel-2.2.16-3.  The machines all use eepro100-like NICs, of
course.

When we first noticed these messages a number of months ago, a Google
search quickly lead us to increase the numbers in /proc/sys/vm/freepages
to "1024 2048 3072".   We were also experiencing server crashes at the
time ("killing interrupt handler", IIRC) and we hoped tuning the VM this
way would resolve the issue.  The change did indeed seem to fix it.

One of our servers crashed again a few weeks ago, so we've re-opened the
ticket.  The crash message was the same ("killing interrupt handler"), but
I don't have decent details on the crash since we had to get the system
back on-line fast.  Checking the logs, we have been seeing our friend
"eth0: card reports no resources." again a lot lately.

I tried increasing freepages some more, to "2048 4096 6144", but the
messages continue.  I'm either changing the wrong thing, or I'm not
changing it far enough.

Google searches lead me to several posts of Andrey's, saying "increase the
numbers in /proc/sys/vm/freepages".  OK, I have :)  Are my changes too
small?

I've checked the changelogs for newer kernel releases but I don't get the
impression that much has changed.

The eepro100 version is use:

v1.09j-t 9/29/99 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/eepro100.html
$Revision: 1.20.2.3 $ 2000/03/02 Modified by Andrey V. Savochkin <saw@saw.sw.com.sg> and others

Any ideas?

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Louis Mandelstam                    Technical Manager, Infoline (Pty) Ltd