[eepro100] card reports no resources

[CheeChun Kok]

Hi,
I have been faced with the problem of card reporting no 
resources and have tried various steps suggested by 
various contributors, notably Andrey Savochkin.

Our setup is as follows :
. Dedicated network monitoring equipment running kernel 
  2.2.14, rpm obtained from RedHat 6.2 on 800MHz PIII.  
. 256M RAM
. 5 Intel PRO/100 S (reported as i82557 PCI Speedo by the
  driver)

Other than the above, the other components are those of a 
typical PC.

The PC essentially runs a single process which continually
reads IP packets from the NICs to process the data carried
in them.  The error message starts appearing intermittently
during operation.  We have not seen them occuring immediately
after startup (hence ruling out receiver bug being the 
cause ??)

We have not seen the message "can't fill rx buffer" using
v1.09j-t Revision: 1.18 $ 1999/12/29 Modified by Andrey V. 
Savochkin.  This suggest that we are not running short of
kernel memory (??)

The version of the driver is 1.13 dated 1/9/2001 (uses pci-scan)
which supposed fixed the occurence of the same messages 
during startup.

I have changed a couple of changes to the source
. increased RX_RING_SIZE to 64
. added kernel message where it used to occur in Andrey's code 
    if ((status & 0x003c) == 0x0008) { /* No resources (why?!) */ 

Here are some kernel/driver messages which might be helpful.

dmesg
=====
eth0: OEM i82557/i82558 10/100 Ethernet at 0xd002f000,
00:D0:B7:44:E4:8B, IRQ 9.
  Receiver lock-up bug exists -- enabling work-around.
  Board assembly 734938-003, Physical connectors present: RJ45
  Primary interface chip i82555 PHY #1.
  General self-test: passed.
  Serial sub-system self-test: passed.
  Internal registers self-test: passed.
  ROM checksum self-test: passed (0x04f4518b).     

free -m
=======
             total       used       free     shared    buffers    
cached
Mem:           251        247          4         38         93        
82
-/+ buffers/cache:         71        180
Swap:          133          5        128   

/proc/sys/vm/freepages
======================
256     512     768 

I have just turned on the debug level and am currently
monitoring the messages.

I see the comment "No resources (why?!)" in the code.  Does Intel
have an explanation to this or are they keeping mum about it?
I wonder if this happen in their Windows (urgh!!) driver.

Changing the kernel version and the NIC in our equipment is an 
option but a last resort because of the installed base.

Thanks in advance
CheeChun