[tulip] Two Compex FL6400 cards?

Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Tue, 14 Aug 2001 10:32:38 -0400 (EDT)


On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Danilo Godec wrote:

> I'm having a little problem with two Compex FL6400TX (four-port) cards.
> Each has four 21143 chips on it, but they seem to be unhappy with sharing
> interrupts.
> 
> Loading the module goes OK, I can use the tulip driver that comes with
> 2.2.19 kernel or the one from scyld.com (v0.92x) - there seems to be no
> difference in operation.
> 
> IRQs are 'shared' in pairs (for example, eth0 gets IRQ 9 and so does
> eth6).
> 
> I can setup and use the first (eth0) port. When I try to ifconfig eth6,
> after a few seconds it reports a 'TX hung ...' and it doesn't work unless
> I generate traffic on eth0!

This is a common problem.  Your BIOS is broken with PCI devices behind a
bus bridge.  The BIOS writes the wrong IRQ level into the IRQ reporting
register.

> Is it perhaps a motherboard/BIOS issue and I could have better luck on a
> newer motherboard (this one is quite old, it's using Pentium MMX
> processor)?

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993