2^31 packet counter bug?

[Jerry Glomph Black]

2 billion packets and you're off the air...?

I've seen several 2.2.12/2.2.13 machines lose
their network connections after functioning perfectly
a long period.   Tonight a number of our busy machines fell off
the net.  I visited one of the
boxes, it had not crashed at all.   However, it was
not communicating via its
(Intel eepro100) ethernet port.

The evil evidence:

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:90:27:50:A8:DE
          inet addr:172.16.0.20  Bcast:172.16.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:15 errors:288850 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2147483647 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          Interrupt:10 Base address:0xd000



Check out the TX packets number!  That's 2^31-1.

This is a busy (router) machine.  It takes about a week to hit this many
packets.   And it took a week for this box to fall off the net.

ifconfigging eth0 down-and-up did not clear the
problem.  A reboot was necessary... What is this,
NT or something?  Bleah!

This is absolutely dreadful.  Is this 'feature' a
property of the eepro100
driver, or something in the kernel itself?
Either way, it's a killer.  Gotta get to the bottom of it.

Standard 2.2.12/2.2.13 kernels, with included eepro100 code.