Problems with SMC 9432 TX in Alpha

Chris Maresca ckm@onebox.com
Wed Oct 27 15:42:57 1999


Hello,

I'm having some strange problems with an SMC Etherpower II card in an Alpha Multia machine.  This card worked just fine under RH5.3, but is now throwing PCI bus errors under RH6.0.  I haven't changed anything else.  It's currently running kernel 2.2.5-16.  The card returns SMC 9432 TX (rev 8) in /proc/pci.  

Here is the error I am getting:

PCI Bus Error! EPIC status 4259000

This is written out to the console, not to /var/log/messages, about once a second when it is being generated.

I also set the debug level to 6, but got no additional usefull messages, other than the fact that the card is running at half-duplex.

Another symptom is that when I try to telnet to another machine, it connects, but never gives a login prompt.  While trying to figure out wat the problem was, I used tcpdump (putting eth1 into PROMISC mode), that's when the above error was generated.  Before doing that, I got absolutely no errors, just wierd circumstancial evidence that the networking was broken (not being able to connect to/from anywhere via telnet).

Since ping seems to be broken on RH6.0 (it gives 'wrong data byte #8' errors), it isn't much use, but it shows that ICMP requests seem to be getting through to other machines.

Here are some things that I have tried:

 - downloaded and compiled latest driver
 - reset the card by rebooting
 - verified routing tables
 - checked IRQ conflicts
 - checked ARP caches

I've also downloaded the diagnostic programs, but I haven't compiled them yet since they seem to operate at a very low level, beyond my understanding.

Does anyone have any ideas about further investigations or perhaps a solution?  At this point, I'm thinking of rolling back to RH5.3, since it worked fine.

TIA,

Chris.


-- 
Chris Maresca -- ckm@onebox.com

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