[realtek] Frequent timeouts.

[sharkey@ale.physics.sunysb.edu]

Hi Roger,

It's been my general experience that the 8139 driver distributed with
the 2.2 kernel series is less than perfect.  There have been many
reports of network dropouts and needing to ifconfig down/ifconfig up
to get things running again.  Individual machines can go for hours,
days, weeks or months without problems, but then suddenly have problems not
unlike what you've described.

The 2.3 kernel series contains two drivers for these cards (I think
they're both still there).  There's the original 8129/8139 driver and
the 8139too driver, which is Jeff Garzik's fork of Donald's original
8129/8139 driver.  Jeff's branch is reported to have fixed these problems,
and, I haven't seen any such problems when running the latest version
of his branch, but I haven't done extensive testing of it either, since
it only runs in the 2.3 kernel series.

If you're running this code on assurancetourix, I'm surprised you're seeing
these problems.

Eric