[realtek] Problems: panics and reboots

[Allan Jacobsen]

Hi

We are building servers where we have some (4-20) NCs
that boot from the server. We have been using 3com 905
until about 6 months ago, when we switched to Dlink 538,
and both have been running with few problems.
Resently the Dlink 538 changed to the 8139C chip, which
gave us some problems, until we found that the driver in
the standard linux kernel was very old(1.07), and when
we used ver. 1.13 from scyld it seemed to work OK.
We have now seen several servers give a kernel panic and
lock up completely, or simply reboot without any warning
under heavy network load.
We have made a test setup with 20 NCs, and when we turn
them on one by one the servers die when we reach somewhere
between 15-20 NCs.
We then put a 3com card in and it worked fine.
This is not just 1 PC, it was on each of the 6 server that
we build last week, so it looks like there is a problem.
The hardware is:

Chaintech MB
AMD duron 700Mhz cpu
128 Mbyte ram
Trident blade3D 8Mbyte grafhics
vscom pci 2 channel serial card
kernel 2.2.17 with scan-pci and rtl8139 modules
2 x Dlink 538 network cards. 1 for the NCs and 1 for the outside

-- 
Med Venlig hilsen / Best Regards
Allan Jacobsen
SW Engineer, R&D
2M ELECTRONIC A/S