[tulip] problem with tulip card ceasing to function - requires ifup/ifdown to fix

[dani-post@roisman.com]

Donald,
Thanks for your prompt response. Please see below for additional info

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 01:59:13PM -0500, Donald Becker wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Nov 2001 dani-post@roisman.com wrote:
> 
> > # tulip-diag -aa -ee -mm
> > tulip-diag.c:v2.06 1/8/2001 Donald Becker (becker@scyld.com)
> >  http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html
> > Index #1: Found a Digital DS21143 Tulip adapter at 0xc800.
> >  * A potential Tulip chip has been found, but it appears to be active.
> >  * Either shutdown the network, or use the '-f' flag to see all values.
> > Digital DS21143 Tulip chip registers at 0xc800:
> >  0x00: f8a08000 ffffffff ffffffff 07fee800 07feea00 f0660000 b20e2202 fbfffbff
> 
> Was this when the chip stopped?  Or after you restarted?
> Everything looks normal, with all registers having the expected
> configuration.
> 

after the restart.  sorry I didn't grab stats during the problem, the heat was on to get the firewall up again.


> Hmmm, you either have an extreme burst of small packets, or some other
> driver is hogging the machine.  The status is reporting a normal receive
> done interrupt.

there's really nothing else going on in this system, the one 4-port ethernet card, no HD (entire system is in Ram Disk), no mounted cdrom or floppy, it's just doing ipchains filtering.  But sometimes there are a lot of small packets.

Is it expected behavior that a burst of small packets cause the card to cease passing traffic?

> 
> Try changing the max_interrupt_work paramter from the default of 25 to 100
> in /etc/modules.conf
> 
> options tulip max_interrupt_work=100

Can you help me understand exactly what that number means? 

Also, I have the driver compiled in, not loaded as a module.  How could I change in in my situation?

- Dani