[tulip-bug] troublesome linksys NIC

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Keith Warno wrote:

> Donald Becker wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Keith Warno wrote:
> >>>Did you see a messge that reported
> >>>    printk(KERN_WARNING "%s: Tx hung, %d vs. %d.\n",
> >>>
> >>Yes I have seen this message before, as recent as today, but not with 
> >>this current driver version (not yet anyway), only with the previous 
> >>driver version which was "tulip.c:v0.92 4/17/2000".
> >>
> > 
> > Hmmm, OK, that means that the timeout was triggered by a new transmit
> > attempt, not in the timer-based monitoring code.
...
> We use a variety of Linksys LNE100 cards here.  Version 2.0 and version 
> 4.1, although I can't tell you off the top of my head what is in that box.

This is a Lite-On PNIC-2 chip, thus a version 2.0 card.

The bug is very likely with the hardware design of the chip.  Other
Tulip clones don't report a problem with the same driver structure.

> The box is a mail server, serving about 60 people.  It gets hammered all 
> day, every day, and is the only box with a linksys NIC that has been 
> having transmit timeouts time and time again.  However those Tx hung 
> messages are a recent thing (within the past couple of weeks).

When this happens, do you notice a transmit pause of more than four
seconds?  (There should be no interruption of Rx packets, although you
won't be able to tell that when a server can't transmit.)


Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993