[realtek] Probme with Realtek RTL8139 Driver

[Butch Kemper]

I have a debian linux system with the 2.2.20 kernel with two realtek 
rtl8139 ethernet cards installed.  I have downloaded and compiled the 
latest version of rtl8139, v1.24:

Jun 30 10:17:20 whitehills kernel: rtl8139.c:v1.24 11/13/2003 Donald 
Becker, becker at scyld.com.
Jun 30 10:17:20 whitehills kernel:  http://www.scyld.com/network/rtl8139.html
Jun 30 10:17:20 whitehills kernel: eth0: RealTek RTL8139C Fast Ethernet at 
0xec00, IRQ 11, 00:30:4f:1e:c6:a8.
Jun 30 10:17:20 whitehills kernel: eth1: RealTek RTL8139C Fast Ethernet at 
0xe800, IRQ 10, 00:50:22:b1:a4:2b.

The system functions as a router for a wireless network with the access 
point and the customer radios/routers on the eth1 card.  I experience the 
following problems:

	1.  The eth1 card will stop passing traffic.  I have
	    a cron task that runs every 5 minutes to ping
	    the access point and if the ping fails, the eth1
	    interfaces is stopped and then started.  Traffic
	    begins to flow again and the kern.log will
	    sometimes contain this message:

	    Jul  2 19:30:19 whitehills kernel: eth1: Oversized
	    Ethernet frame, status 6d1ff70b!

	2.  Sometimes the kernel will do a panic halt with an
	    error message on the console about trying to kill
            the idle task. The system then requires a manual
	    reset to get going again.

	3.  Sometimes the system will reboot and the logs
	    contain no messages giving a reason.

I have several routers using this same kernel version, driver version, and 
realtek cards, and this is the only system having the problem.  I think the 
problem is related to a customer radio/router sending a very large packet 
but because of the intermittent nature of the problem, I have not been able 
to make an associate to a particular customer.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Butch





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