tulip driver: fixed for Tx hung error

[Tom Blauwendraat]

Hello,

This is to all people (like Jeff Forbes and Jason Thomas) that get the
Tx hung error when using a card with the D21143 chip on it. It's a
problem i also experienced with the Compex FL100 network card that also
has this chip. For a while, it works fine, but then after a short while
the Tx hung errors appear and the card stops working. Then, if you
execute "ifconfig eth0 down" to bring the card down, and you reconfigure
the network, it works again, but still for only a short while until the
errors reappear.

When I had this error I started searching on the Internet, and I found
some mailinglist archives on www.Tux.org (via a link on the CESDIS
page). There, I found that Vojtech Pavlik had created a patch to fix the
0.91g driver for this error. However, I had to mail him personally to
get the correct link to this driver. I quoted that mail below.

My driver works fine with this patch. So, everyone, the solution to your
problems is here. Just scroll on. And thank Vojtech Pavlik for his work.

However, there are still a few things I'd like to say. First of all, I
found this patch by going to linux.org, following a link to CESDIS, and
there following the link to Tux.org. But the mailinglist archives there
are not up to date. The right archives are at Beowulf. That should be
corrected; how else can people search if their problem has not already
been noted and solved by someone else before?
Second, why isn't there a central archive for patches like Vojtech's? I
think it's strange that it should be on suse.cz instead of near the
official release site of the Tulip driver. Why also isn't there a 0.91h
or something like that released, if the solution is already there. I can
understand that you developers are very busy people, but still.
Maybe hosting and archiving of these drivers can be done by a central
distribution site?

And lastly a question: exactly what should be sent to linux-tulip and
what to linux-tulip-bug. I find it hard to draw a line there; when i
read the messages in each archive, they seem all to be going about the
same thing; errors that people encounter while using the driver......

Okay, that's that.
Happy Linuxing all!
(and merry christmas)
Tom Blauwendraat

Vojtech Pavlik wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 16, 1999 at 12:01:37PM -0500, Tom Blauwendraat wrote:
>
> > I noticed you have removed your patch for the Linux tulip.c driver 0.91g
> > from the suse.cz server. I was already so happy to find the solution for my
> > problem confined in one mailinglist entry, but now i see it is gone and i
> > also can't find any 0.91 driver that has the flag INTR_MITIGATION in it. And
> > my network card keeps giving error messages like Tx hung: xxx against xxx.
> > So, what should i do? Is there a driver that has the bug fixed that i can
> > get from somewhere? Or could you put the patch back online?
> >
> > I have a Compex FL100 100mbit network card with the mentioned D21143 Intel
> > chip.
>
> It was because our www server moved, it's now on:
>
>         http://www.suse.cz/development/tulip/
>
> --
> Vojtech Pavlik
> SuSE Labs