Realtek 8139 unstable?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  5 December 2003 at  8:51:30 +0200, Chris Visser wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm running FreeBSD 5.1, on a box with a Digi Sync 570 card and a
> Realtek 8139 network card.
>
> The Machine runs fine, most of the time, but every now and again my
> network card stops working for no reason.  Rebooting the box fixes this
> for a while, but the it starts again.

There have been reports of instabilities with the 8139.  I don't know
if it's really the hardware to blame or the driver, but the
documentation for the hardware is apparently so terrible that it's
difficult to say.

I'm using an 8139 in a number of places, including (currently) my main
server machine.  The switch notes a large number of errors under load,
and I'm thinking of changing to a different card the next time I have
to reboot.

Rather than reboot your machine, you'll probably find that the
following sequence unwedges the card:

  ifconfig rl0 down
  ifconfig rl0 up

I had this in a cron job at one point.

Greg
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