PNIC cards locking up in SMP system

[Eric Jorgensen]

	I have some machines here running kernel 2.2.14 that are
experiencing some difficulty with Netgear PNIC based cards. 

	The machines themselves are less than ideal. They're fairly low
grade server class hardware, from Appro. Consists of a PCI/ISA backplane
and a motherboard-on-a-card with an Intel BX chipset and dual PII-450's.
That all sounds pretty cool but trust me, you don't want these. 

	These systems also experienced the classic lockup problems when
they were running with Intel 82559 boards, so I'm starting to wonder if
the problems have something to do with the pci bus. 

	The behavior with the PNIC boards is this - At some inopportune
moment, like 3:16am when nobody who knows what they're doing is around,
or alternately at some busy point during the business day when they're
badly needed, the cards in one or the other system (identical hardware)
will simply stop talking. They show link, but stop talking to the network. 

	If i unload tulip.o and reload it, they're fine. 

	The boxes in question only run bind 8 and xntpd, so the hardware
is clearly overkill, but it's the hardware designated for the task. 

	I'm starting to think that the problems might be related to
interaction with the pci bus in these systems. I've pasted below some
choice entries from /proc/pci. It seems pretty odd to me that pci would
report a host bridge and PCI bridge as both being "Unknown device" and
then way down the list report a DEC PCI bridge. 

	I've got four of these systems. The two that had the issues with
the Intel nics and have the issue with the Netgear nics both have Adaptec
aic7880 scsi cards in them, but /proc/interrupts doesn't show a conflict.
The two other systems are still using 82559 cards and haven't experienced
the classic intel pro100b lockup issue. One of them has both an Adaptec
card and an AMI Megaraid card, the other just has a Megaraid card. 

	Any thoughts? 

 - Eric

-----


  Bus  0, device   0, function  0:
    Host bridge: Intel Unknown device (rev 3).
      Vendor id=8086. Device id=7190.
      Medium devsel.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.  
      Prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe0000000 [0xe0000008].
  Bus  0, device   1, function  0:
    PCI bridge: Intel Unknown device (rev 3).
      Vendor id=8086. Device id=7191.
      Medium devsel.  Master Capable.  Latency=64.  Min Gnt=132.
  Bus  0, device   7, function  0:
    ISA bridge: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 2).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.  No
bursts.  
  Bus  0, device  20, function  0:
    PCI bridge: DEC DC21152 (rev 3).
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  Master Capable.
Latency=64.  Min Gnt=3.Max Lat=4.


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