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

[Andrey Savochkin]

Hello,

Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacations.

On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 04:00:23PM +0200, Louis Mandelstam wrote:
> 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.

There are two different problems related to "card reports no resources"
messages.

The first one is the shortage of memory.
In this case this message is accompanied by "can't fill rx buffer" one, and
adjusting /proc/sys/vm/freepages solves the shortage.

The second problem is "card reports no resources" reports starting right
after driver initialization.
It happens because of a hardware bug, for which Donald Becker recently found
a workaround and implemented it in his driver available from ftp://scyld.com.
The driver shipped with mainstream Linux kernels will have the same fix soon.

Best regards
					Andrey V.
					Savochkin