NIC card problems

Peter C. Lai sirmoo at cowbert.2y.net
Sat Jan 7 00:20:36 PST 2006


Peter Jeremy wrote:
>Real DEC Tulip cards do this when running Tru64 as well.  My guess is that
>it's a bug in the NIC.  (And it looks like AMDtek have copied it).

Peter, Warner, Stefan, et al.:

I just found this thread on the mailing list, and am responding to it, a year
later :) I also believe the problem is a bug in the NIC as well, since the 
ADMTek 985 appears to not listen to the "automagic buffer underrun recovery" 
command. Silby added some patches to mbuf allocation in 2003 after stress 
testing dc(4), which improves the situation somewhat (ability to 
sustain the traffic longer) but doesn't solve it.

While my system doesn't reboot (panic), it will often hang as a result of
this. What happens then is that when the interface tries to transmit, a 
"No buffer space available" error occurs. If one can access the console, it 
can be rescued by bringing the interface down and then up again using 
ifconfig(8). This will reset the card and presumably flush the buffers.

I wonder if any work has been done on the driver in -CURRENT (and I am too
lazy to look), but in the next few weeks the machine is getting overhauled
from 4.11 to 6 (reformat/reinstall) so we shall see if it does anything.

-- 
Peter C. Lai
Dept. of Neurobiology
Yale University School of Medicine
http://cowbert.2y.net/



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