[tulip] dfe-570tx hangs at ifconfig

[Adam Goldman]

I'm experiencing system hangs when bringing up the interfaces of D-Link 
DFE-570TX quad Tulip cards. If the interfaces are ifconfig'd in a 
specific order, the machine will lock hard. Some orders of ifconfig'ing 
avoid hanging the machine, but subsequent network traffic will hang the 
system. No error messages are displayed, the machine just goes 
unresponsive as soon as the ifconfig command is issued.

I have tried both an Asus P3B-F and a Tyan S1857 motherboard, with 
similar results. Both are based on the BX chipset. I have tried two 
different DFE-570TX cards; the problem occurs with both of them. I have 
also tried replacing the DFE-570TX cards with Kingston KNE100TX 
single-port Tulip cards, and was not able to reproduce the hang between 
two of them, but since I only have two of the KNE100TX cards, it's 
possible that they too would cause the hang if there were four of them.

The sequence to reproduce the hang depends on the motherboard and what 
set of cards are in the machine. For instance, with the P3B-F board and 
one DFE-570TX card in PCI slot 1, the sequence "ifconfig eth0 up; ifconfig 
eth1 up" causes a hang. On the other hand, on the S1857 motherboard, with 
the DFE-570TX in PCI slot 3, that sequence does not provoke a hang, but 
the sequence "ifconfig eth0 up; ifconfig eth3 up" does.

Although I could not reproduce a hang with two of the KNE100TX cards, I 
was able to reproduce a hang between a KNE100TX and a DFE-570TX. This was 
with the S1857 motherboard, the DFE-570TX in PCI slot 3, and the KNE100TX 
in PCI slot 4. The KNE100TX was eth0 and the DFE-570TX was eth1-4. The 
sequence "ifconfig eth3 up; ifconfig eth0 up" induced a hang.

All tests were done under Linux 2.2.16 with the "2.2.16combo" errata 
patch from www.linux.org.uk and patches to the initrd and linuxrc code. 
Other than the network cards, the only cards in the machines under test 
were AGP video cards. Version "0.92 4/17/2000" and 0.89H of the Tulip 
driver displayed this problem, as well as v0.544 of the de4x5 driver.

Does anyone have any idea what might be going wrong here? I would like to 
get this machine working as soon as possible and would appreciate any 
suggestions as to how to resolve or further investigate this problem.

--
Adam Goldman <adam@rtg.com>