Longshine 8139 card jams on heavy TX & RX load

[James Stevens]

Hi All,

I have a Realtek 8139 based 10/100 card from Longshine in an A-Bit PR5
motherboard on a 10Mhz ethernet. To stress the ethernet I have a simple
program called "open_socket" which opens port 19 ("chargen") on a server
on the LAN and reads (a lot), displaying bytes read per second. This
usually is in the region of 980,000 to 1,200,000 on 10Mhz ethernet.

With the RealTek driver it works fine as a "chargen" client (1,100,000
bytes/s at 93% idle on the P75), it also works fine as a server (same
data rate at 60% idle), but if I try to use it as a client AND server
simultainiously then after a short time (<5 seconds) of working, it
stops. In "ifconfig" on the "TX" line I get "overruns" set to 3 and all
packets after that increase the TX error count. I left the system for a
while and it never unlocked the ethernet port.

Then I did "ifconfig eth0 down", "rmmod rtl8139" and disconnected the
card from the hub. I then did "insmod rtl8139.0", and re-configured the
card's ip address and added the route back into the routing table and
the card worked again.

In /var/log/syslog, I get the messages :-

Transmit timeout, status 0d 0000 media 08.
Tx queue start entry 4, dirty entry 0.

"rtl8139-diag -e" gave :-

Found a RealTek PCI Ethernet RealTek RTL8139 card at 0x6100.
EEPROM contents:
  8129 10ec 8139 10ec 8139 4020 f310 0000
  60e8 4a10 0c10 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
  0000 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
  ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
 The word-wide EEPROM checksum is 0x8f8c.
Parsing the EEPROM of a RealTek chip:
  PCI IDs -- Vendor 0x10ec, Device 0x8139, Subsystem 0x10ec.
  PCI timer settings -- minimum grant 32, maximum latency 64.
  General purpose pins --  direction 0xf3  value 0x10.
  Station Address 00:00:E8:60:10:4A.
  Configuration register 0/1 -- 0x0c / 0x00.
 EEPROM active region checksum is 0737.

"rtl8139-diag -m" gave :-

Found a RealTek PCI Ethernet RealTek RTL8139 card at 0x6100.
 The RTL8139 does not use a MII transceiver.
 It does have internal MII-compatible registers:
   Basic mode control register   0x782d.
   Basic mode status register    0x1000.
   Autonegotiation Advertisement 0x05e1.
   Link Partner Ability register 0x0000.
   Autonegotiation expansion     0x0000.
   Disconnects                   0x0000.
   False carrier sense counter   0x0000.
   NWay test register            0x0025.
   Receive frame error count     0x0000.

"rtl8139-diag -f -a" gave :-

Found a RealTek PCI Ethernet RealTek RTL8139 card at 0x6100.
RealTek chip registers at 0x6100
 0x000: 60e80000 00004a10 00000000 00000000 00002000 00002000 00002000
00002000
 0x020: 00f28018 00f28618 00f28c18 00f29218 00da0018 0d000000 0000fff0
0000807f
 0x040: 40000400 00009c00 c5e774d2 00000000 002c1000 00000000 01000008
00100000
 0x060: 1000000f 05e1782d 00000000 00000000 00000025 000077c0 00000000
00000000.
  No interrupt sources are pending.
 The chip configuration is 0x10 0x2c, MII mode.


James

-- 
   +---------------+--------------------------+
   | James Stevens | James.Stevens@jrcs.co.uk |
   |           Tel | 01494 464264             |
   |           Fax | 01494 445374             |
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