[realtek] "too much work at interrupt" and PCI Bus error

[Lyle Hanson]

Hello!  I HOPE someone can help, this has been causing me stress for over
a week now!

I have an SMC 10/100 EZcard with a rtl8139 chip in a RedHat 6.2 machine
running on an old 486.  I have installed the most recent drivers.

The card works okay sometimes, this last time it was up and running for
several hours with no problems whatsoever.  But often, when the card is
busy I get this message:

Kernel: eth0: PCI Bus error 22800007
Kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x8000
Kernel: ide0: reset: success

This gets repeated in the syslog many times.  I'm not sure what the ide0
message has to do with it, but it usually accompanies the troubles.  At
this point, the network dies and a full system lockup follows shortly
after.  Then I reboot, and the card seems to think its MAC is
ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, it logs a PCI latency error (0), sets it to 64, then
says "eth0: RTL8139 Interrupt line blocked, status ffff".  This situation
is only remedied by booting from a Windows boot floppy to the command
prompt and running the SMC diagnostic, which shows everything to be fine.
THen when I boot into linux again, things work (for a while).

Somebody just gave me this box, and I'm not sure if it's got some flakey
hardware (I think the cdrom is because I get "lost interrupt" messages
sometimes when accessing it, or maybe that's an indication of some other,
related troubles?).  I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me get
this thing running so I can quit stressing and concentrate on more vital
things (like school).


Thanks a lot,
Lyle Hanson