[realtek] rtl8139C card makes linux 2.2.18 crash

[Johan Thim]

Hi,

I have had a lot of problems the last few weeks with two newly bought
RTL8139C chips based cards. During heavy network load both of my boxes
hangs with no error output. This is the most common thing, sometimes they
reboots instead and sometimes I get the usual "eth2: Tx queue start entry
241463  dirty entry 241459, full."

Both machines run Linux 2.2.18 and uses the same kind of card. One of the
machines is a p200 which have been stable for the last 4 years and the
other one is an Abit based system that got pretty stable with a new BIOS
a few months ago.

I use v1.13 of of the rtl8139 driver on both machines, and the crashes
happens on both so I guess it must be the card/driver thats causing them.
I tried different BIOS settings for the IRQ lines and so on (even different
permutations of the cards physically) and it always ends up crashing
sooner or later.

It might be worth pointing out that v1.13 works much better than earlier
versions that crashed almost at once :)

I tried the 8139too driver as well, but that one crashes as fast as earlier
versions of the driver I use now.

I checked the mail archive and found out that a similar error existed
before (a memcpy() bug), but that one was fixed later. This feels like
something similar, anyone have any ideas of what I should do? Except
buying a few real cards that is..

Any help appreciated.

/Johan Thim