"could not allocate 65535 byte recieve ring" messages

[Cedric Puddy]

Hello folks,

My apologies if this is an old topic (I have not yet 
located the list archive, and am therefore posting
a rather less informed that I would normally like to
be).

In any case, I have recently started working with a
resonably sized sample set of Linux 2.2.5 boxes (six)
equiped with two RTL8139 NICs apiece.

The message "Could not allocate 65535 byte recieve ring"
comes up occationally on boot (accompanied by the card
not initializing), or very often when I attempt to
re-initialize a cad while the system is running.  I
cannot reliably reproduce this problem, though I have
been able to produce it at least ounce on every system
I have tried installing the cards in.  When a 
system has multiple cards, it usually only affects one
card.  I do not have this problem with other cards,
and other services do not fail.

I upgraded some systems to 2.2.13, and continued to
have the problem.

I had someone with the appropriate experience and 
skill look through the kernel code and driver code
in an attempt to figure out "who is at fault",
and the verdict there was that the driver appeared
to be making a perfectly ordinary request for
a chunk of kernel memory, and that the kernel 
appearred to be refusing on account of believing
itself to have instufficent resources to 
allocate the memory.

This would sound to me like a "general kernel issue",
except that I have been unable to reproduce similar
problems with my "mottly crew" of 3c905b, NE2000 (ISA),
racals, and SMC cards.

I am therefore very interested in hearing if this
is a "known issue" of some kind against either the
driver or someother piece of code, if there is
possibly some workaround that might be had (say,
reducing the size of the recieve ring??), and
so on.

Thanks to everyone who works on these drivers -
though the only name I know is Donald Becker
(those driver pages have been really handy!).

	Regards,

	-Cedric

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