Netgear FA310TX Problems

[William J. Earl]

David Carlin writes:
 > Hello,
 > 	I have two identical machines (Both PPro-200's running RedHat 6.0
 > w/v0.91 of tulip driver) with Netgear FA310TX cards in them that started
 > acting up yesterday.  The cards are hooked into a 10Mbit network via a
 > UTP->Fiber transceiver.  The machines will stay online only for about 10
 > minutes now. The interesting part is, when I put a 10/100 netgear switch
 > between the campus network and the card (plug card into switch, plug
 > UTP->FO Xver into uplink port on switch), it works fine for hours on end.
...
 > Oct 26 14:58:16 vorlon kernel: eth0: Lite-On 82c168 PNIC rev 33 at 0xfc00, 00:A0:CC:3D:2F:CC, IRQ 9. 
 > Oct 26 14:58:16 vorlon kernel: eth0:  MII transceiver #1 config 1000 status 782d advertising 01e1. 
 > Oct 26 14:58:13 vorlon network: Bringing up interface eth0 succeeded 
 > Oct 26 14:58:17 vorlon kernel: eth0: Changing PNIC configuration to half-duplex, CSR6 814e0000. 
 > Oct 26 14:58:21 vorlon kernel: eth0: Too much work during an interrupt, csr5=0x02670050. 
 > Oct 26 15:01:38 vorlon kernel: eth0: Oversized Ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers, status 7fffbfff! 
 > Oct 26 15:01:38 vorlon kernel: eth0: Too much work during an interrupt, csr5=0x026f0050. 
 > Oct 26 15:01:38 vorlon kernel: eth0: Oversized Ethernet frame spanned multiple buffers, status 7fffbfff! 
...

     This looks to me like the known problem with the 82c168.  The oversized frame
is really a normal frame prefixed with a lot of garbage.  It seems to be related
to running in half-duplex mode at 10 Mbit.  As near as I can tell, it is triggered
by a small packet arriving at the interface just after a large packet has
been transmitted, perhaps somehow confusing the 83c168 as it switches from
transmitting to receiving.