[realtek] Weirdness

[magenta]

Hey, it's me again... still have an RTL8139C-based card from CompUSA, with
that cheap-ass motherboard with the bus-mastering issues.

For some reason, when using the rtl8139 driver, I would randomly have
situations where the firewall system's NIC would just suddenly fail, with
no apparent reason... nothing put into any of the logs or dmesg, and as far
as the kernel could tell, there was no failure, but for some reason, it'd
stop successfully sending out packets.  Doing an rmmod/insmod wouldn't help
anything; the card would keep on being unresponsive until I rebooted the
system.  This would happen randomly; sometimes as much as twice a day,
sometimes as much as a week apart, but it seemed to depend primarily on the
amount of traffic (like it was a counter rolling over or something).

For some reason, ever since I switched to the hedonistic 8139too driver a
couple weeks ago, I stopped having these problems...

Is there some difference between the default configuration of 8139too and
rtl8139 which would account for this?  Or is it just some big coincidence
and as soon as I post this message the network card will freeze again?

I'm sorry I can't be more specific about the failure mode, but I seriously
can't find anything in the logs which would indicate that the driver was
even aware of a problem with transmission.

-- 
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