[eepro100-bug] PC with Intel D845BG motherboard hangs up

[H&G]

Hi,

I recently bought a vpr Matrix 2020 PC. It has an Intel D845BG motherboard
(i845D chipset) with an onboard 82562 NIC. It runs Red Hat 7.3.
When booting, the message "network: Bringing up interface eth0" seems fine
(I subscribed to a DSL access with Qwest+MSN, don't blame me !)

But after a while, the whole system hangs up and the only thing I can do 
is to restart
the machine. It took me a long time to came to that conclusion, but now 
I'm quite
sure that the problem was related to the "eepro100" driver included in the
2.4.18-5 Red Hat kernel.

First I tried to download and compile the 2.4.19-rc1 kernel but it 
didn't change
anything (maybe I was able to work a little longer before the system 
hangs up).
Did I miss something when I configured my 2.4.19-rc1 kernel?
Is there a patch somewhere for the "eepro100" driver? (No one is 
mentionned on
http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.html.)

Then I browsed the web to get some info about the "eepro100" driver and in
the "eepro100 mailing list Archives" I found people who seemed to have 
resolved
this problem by using the Intel "e100" driver.
So I did the same and now everything works fine.

Now I'm just curious to know if other people still have problems when 
trying to run
their 82562 NIC with the "eepro100" driver?
And if it's a "eepro100" related problem, what can I do to help? Will 
the final
2.4.19 kernel include a "eepro100" driver that fully support the 82562 NIC?
I would really prefer to use the GPL'd driver rather than the 
proprietary Intel
driver...


Herve