system lockup with RTL8139

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Ron Luse wrote:

> I am running kernel 2.2.10, now with the 1.08f rtl8139 driver mentioned by
> Donald in his reply to the above quoted message.
...
> When the interface fails, the statistics from ifconfig reveal that there
> was an RX over-run.  I have loaded the driver with various levels of
> debug, sometimes resulting in the system being MORE resistant to interface
> hanging (particularly at debug > 4).

More messages might be changing the timing, especially by causing more
activity that allows the card to have more PCI bus bandwidth.

>  Some failures also give me the 
> error "Oversized Ethernet frame, status XXXXXXXX with varying values
> of XXXXXXXX. In perusing the code, near the "Oversized" printf I see 
> the comment:
> 		/* A.C.: The chip hangs here. */
> Which seems to be exactly what's happening.

The Realtek people say the chip doesn't hang with oversized frames.
I haven't been able to reproduce the problem. I've been running
continuous tests for two days on both SMP and uniprocessors systems.

Perhaps under heavy PCI bus load something is happening that corrupts the Rx
packet list.  The status we are seeing (what are the exact numbers?) is
actually packet data, or something of the sort.

> Is this a known problem with the chip?  Is there a work around possible?
> Does anyone want more specifics of this failure?  Can anyone offer any
> tips on what I might try to fix this ?  I have device driver experience,
> but would appreciate any tips on where to start.

I'll change the RxTooLong check so that it resets the Rx hardware...
   ftp://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/linux/drivers/kern-2.3/rtl8139.c


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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