Sudden Timeout Error of RTL-8139 Card

[Donald Becker]

On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, James Stevens wrote:

> This is the same problem I have been seeing. V1.02 of the driver should
> stop your networking from hanging, but it does not stop the Tx errors
> from occurring. I am hoping that Donald is working on something to fix
> this problem, as IMHO, the driver is still unusable in a live
> environment.

I have a proposed fix:
 on line 999 of rtl8139.c:v1.02 change "TxHostOwns" to "TxStatOK | TxAborted"

My current theory is that there is a race condition between the chip
indicating the packet has been transferred to the Tx FIFO, at which point
the driver may load a new packet, and the chip posting an error status to
that register.  The change above waits until the packet is actually
transmitted (or encounters an error) before loading the next packet.

If you have encountered repeatable transmit halts in the past, please try
the above patch and send me a report.

Donald Becker					  becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
USRA-CESDIS, Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center,  Greenbelt, MD.  20771
301-286-0882	     http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/people/becker/whoiam.html

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