[epic] epic100.c, SMC EtherPower II, SMC83c170/175 "EPIC"

[Ingo Rohloff]

Hello,

I have got a "[SMC] 83C170QF" adaptor in my computer and I wasn't
able to use the driver which is in linux-2.4.9.

The sympotms are lot's of messages of this in /var/log/messages:
"kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x008d0004"

This seems to be a known problem; at least I found other people
complaining about the same message in their kernel logs.
The problem has different severity for different people. 
I wasn't able to get the card working at all (basically the
computer hung, while trying to mount several NFS directories).

After searching the web for further information I was able
to obtain a patched version, which was modified Heiko Boch. 
It seems this version is an older linux-2.4.x driver with 
some additional patches.

This version works without glitches on my system with a 
vanilla linux-2.4.9 kernel. 

The homepage of Heiko Boch doesn't seem to exist anymore, so
for all people who use this card and have the above problem,
I put his modified version of epic100.c on my home page at
www.in.tum.de/~rohloff (look for epic100.c). 

I hope that after some testing someone can have a look over
this version, who really can tell what the essential differences
compared to the version in linux-2.4.9 are.

Perhaps this will lead to a working linux-2.4.xx version in the future.

so long
  Ingo