[eepro100] Dell 4400 instability with eepro100 driver...

[Donald Becker]

This might relate to the report earlier this week about NMI problems
on a Dell 4400

From: Patrick Geoffray <patrick@myri.com>
Subject: Re: intermittent crashing of programs

Donald Becker wrote:
> Could you elaborate?  What PCI problems cause a NMI, and on which
> motherboards.
...
I have seen it on x330 and supermicro DLE: the SCSI board would issue a 
SERR on the PCI, and it would be translated to a NMI in the system. NMIs 
are very hard to debug because it's hard to know what is the source of 
these NMIs.
For this specific problem with SCSI, we used a PCI analyser and noticed 
the SERR. I am not 100% sure why the SCSI was dying with a SERR, but it 
was after the board asked for the bus and was waiting for a long DMA in 
progress by another PCI device to finish. Replacing the SCSI card was 
the solution in this case.


|   Patrick Geoffray, Ph.D.      patrick@myri.com
|   Myricom, Inc.                http://www.myri.com