Vortex driver issue under linux

[Scott A Crosby]

Hello, I would like to say great work on the Vortex network drivers

I have one annoying problem with the current driver version, (Earlier
versions (~9 months ago) did not have this particular problem, but other
ones slightly less annoying and more minor.)

When I boot up the computer, the network card works fine for incoming 
short packets ~200 bytes, but the packet drop rate on incoming packets
increases to nearly 100% when the packet size gets up to 1000 bytes. 
Outgoing packets don't seem to be affected at all. (This was determined by 
running a pair of packet traces and seeing what was being sent on the
wire.) The packet counters read from /proc/net/dev increase only in the
error column.

This condition appears to persists indefinitely, until a suffiecient
number of packets have been sent (recieved?)  over the wire.

If I flood-ping or cause other types of high-bandwidth traffic. The
condition usually cleans itself up perfectly fine after a few minutes, and
I have absolutely no other issues with the driver, I get full bandwidth,
and all packets go through fine. 

This problem isn't usually an issue for me because I run Linux almost
exclusively and seldom reboot more than once every few days.

Scott Crosby

Here is the log extracted from dmesg:

**** BOOTUP ****
sysctl: ip forwarding enabled
eth0: Media override to transceiver 0 (10baseT).
eth0: vortex_open() InternalConfig 01030218.
eth0: vortex_open() irq 11 media status 88c0.
eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e101.  Temporarily disabling functions (7efe).


**** Error message as the thing goes fully functional ****
eth0: Host error, FIFO diagnostic register 2000.
eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status 8000.
  Flags; bus-master 1, full 1; dirty 195 current 211.
  Transmit list 00000000 vs. 03985b40.
  0: @03985b10  length 80000412 status 00000412
  1: @03985b20  length 80000412 status 80000412
  2: @03985b30  length 80000412 status 80000412
  3: @03985b40  length 80000412 status 00000412
  4: @03985b50  length 80000412 status 00000412
  5: @03985b60  length 80000412 status 00000412
  6: @03985b70  length 80000412 status 00000412
  7: @03985b80  length 80000412 status 00000412
  8: @03985b90  length 80000412 status 00000412
  9: @03985ba0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  10: @03985bb0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  11: @03985bc0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  12: @03985bd0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  13: @03985be0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  14: @03985bf0  length 80000412 status 00000412
  15: @03985c00  length 80000412 status 00000412
eth0: Resetting the Tx ring pointer.