"Transmit timed out" error. Bad hardware?

[David St. John]

Hi,

Yesterday, we started getting *very* slow response from our ethernet Card,
an Intel EtherExpress Pro+.  Looking in /var/log/messages, I saw these:

Nov  8 16:33:42 reporter kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0090
command 0000.
Nov  8 16:33:42 reporter kernel: eth0:  Tx timeout  fill index 105990416
scavenge index 105990402.

I've seen "tx timeout" errors like this before with a 3com card, but the
problem went away when I upgraded to Donald's latest driver.  So, I tried
the same thing with the Intel card (installed the latest driver), and now
I'm getting errors like this:

Nov  9 12:22:26 reporter kernel: eth0: Transmit timed out: status 0050  0070
at 27530/27542 command 000c0000.
Nov  9 12:22:26 reporter kernel: eth0: Trying to restart the transmitter...

So, the good news is: it looks like the new driver "fixes" the problem
rather than hanging up.  The bad news is: the problem is still there.  Do I
have a bad card?  Any ideas what could be going on?

The machine is a Pentium II with a Linux 2.0.33 kernel.  Here's what a few
seconds of "mii-diag -w" says:

[david@reporter david]$ ./mii-diag -w
Using the default interface 'eth0'.
Basic registers of MII PHY #1:  3000 782d 02a8 0150 05e1 0021 0000 ffff.
 Basic mode control register 0x3000: Auto-negotiation enabled.
 You have link beat, and everything is working OK.
 Your link partner is generating 10baseT link beat  (no autonegotiation).
12:34:22.134513  Baseline value of MII BMSR (basic mode status register) is
782d.
12:34:29.134513  MII BMSR now 7809:   no link, NWay busy, No Jabber (0000).
12:34:32.134513  MII BMSR now 7829:   no link, NWay done, No Jabber (0021).
   New link partner capability is 0021 0000: 10baseT.
12:34:32.134513  MII BMSR now 782d: Good link, NWay done, No Jabber (0021).
12:34:38.134513  MII BMSR now 7809:   no link, NWay busy, No Jabber (0000).
12:34:40.134513  MII BMSR now 7829:   no link, NWay done, No Jabber (0021).
   New link partner capability is 0021 0000: 10baseT.
12:34:40.134513  MII BMSR now 782d: Good link, NWay done, No Jabber (0021).
...

And it looks like the "no link" reports from mii-diag coincide with the
"Transmit timed out" errors in /var/log/messages.

Bad card?  Any and all help is much appreciated.

--
David St. John
Call of the Wind
http://www.windcall.com/