dc TX underrun leads to delayed crash

[Peter C. Lai]

I'm noticing on a moderately loaded system, that sometimes when the kernel 
increases the TX threshold (/kernel: dc0: TX underrun -- increasing TX 
threshold), a few minutes later, the system hardlocks requiring a reset.
This routinely happens when I'm streaming MP3s over the network and the box
suddenly hardlocks; after I go back to inspect the logs, the TX buffer underrun
is the only thing in the log before the start of the kernel reboot messages.
This is occuring on 4.8-STABLE as of July 7, 2003 on an AMD K6-2 500 with
348 Mb RAM and VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset. When the lockups occur, the system
temperatures are below 40C, with little disk activity, moderate ram and cpu
usage; the NIC (linksys LNE-100TX A) is usually doing a steady 50K/s at this point.
-- 
Peter C. Lai
University of Connecticut
Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology
Yale University School of Medicine
SenseLab | Research Assistant
http://cowbert.2y.net/