3c905B timeouts once again

[Andy C. Brandt]

Hi,

I have a problem with 3c905B under Linux which is similar to what Jerry
Sweet mentioned earlier on the list. 

I have a 3c905B PCI card, which the driver detects like this:

Jul 16 01:38:45 monk kernel: 3c59x.c:v0.99E 5/12/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html
Jul 16 01:38:45 monk kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c905 Boomerang 100baseTx at 0x6000, 00:60:08:af:5e:e1, IRQ 9
Jul 16 01:38:45 monk kernel:   8K word-wide RAM 3:5 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/NWay Autonegotiation interface.
Jul 16 01:38:45 monk kernel:   MII transceiver found at address 24, status 786d.
Jul 16 01:38:45 monk kernel:   Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.

The card works on a 10 Mbps network and is connected to a small hub. From
time to time, I get the same error message Jerry mentioned:

Jul 27 09:32:47 monk kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e800.

when this happens I loose all contact with the machine for a few
moments (sometimes up to a few minutes), after which the card/driver gets
back to work and everything works again. Once the module did crash, but it
was the previous version of the driver and the kernel at that time was
2.0.34pre16. 

Between those errors the overall performance is also poor. There is a
similar machine (PC, Linux) connected to the same hub but with a different
network interface,  here is a comparison of ping times:

Machine with Boomerang card:

ping -s 1000 -q -c 100 mnich.ml.org
PING mnich.ml.org (212.244.54.200): 1000 data bytes

--- mnich.ml.org ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 85 packets received, 15% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 970.2/2257.7/36620.5 ms

Machine on the same LAN with different card:

PING raptor.powernet.pl (212.244.54.130): 1000 data bytes

--- raptor.powernet.pl ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 93 packets received, 7% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 969.9/1055.7/1205.3 ms

My machine is an old 486DX4-100 with 32 megs of RAM. I used it for extended
periods of time with other Ethernet adapters and had no problems whatsoever. 
RedHat 5.0 with 2.0.35 kernel.

I would like to know if there is any possibility that some software solution
to this problems will appear in next versions of the driver? I can't try all
the things that Jerry tried, as the machine is in an another city and all I can
do is change drivers/kernels or go there to change the card to something that
is known to work without problems.

Any suggestions?

-- 
/-------------------+---------------------+--------------------------------\
I Andrzej K. Brandt I andy@pilgrim.ml.org | HP:  http://mnich.ml.org/~andy |
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| "Real love is a commitment, not a feeling."        Anita P. Camplese     |
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