Lockup Linux 2.0.37ac8 with 3C905B (Cyclone)

[Henning P. Schmiedehausen]

Hi,

the situation:

- i486DX33, 16 MB RAM
- 1 IDE HD, 1 CDROM
- 3C905 NIC running at 100 MBit fullduplex of a Cisco 2924 Switch
- Kernel 2.0.37ac8 off ftp.linux.org.uk
- everything built as modules, loaded modules:

% lsmod
Module         Pages    Used by
softdog            1            1
3c59x              5            1 (autoclean)

- machine runs gated (3.5.7) for OSPF routing.

- The NIC is reported as:

eth0: 3Com 3c905B Cyclone 100baseTx at 0xe800,  00:10:5a:d9:04:b5, IRQ 12
8K byte-wide RAM 5:3 Rx:Tx split, autoselect/Autonegotiate interface.
Media override to transceiver type 4 (100baseTX).
Enabling bus-master transmits and whole-frame receives.

off the 

static char *version ="3c59x.c:v0.99H 11/17/98 Donald Becker http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/vortex.html\n";

driver as distributed with 2.0.37ac8



The machine acts as network surveyor and accounting host. It runs the
net-acct package which puts the NIC in promiscous mode, snoops the
packets on the wire and writes accounting logs onto the local
disk. The Cisco Port is in "monitor mode" and mirrors some other (10
MBit) ports of the VLAN.

The whole system is somehow RedHat 4.2 based (libc5).

Symtom: Complete lockup right after the following message on the console:

eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status 8003.  Temporarily disabling functions (7ffc).

This message even makes it (sometimes) into the syslog.

After this, the machine is dead. Complete lockup. No more SHIFT/CTRL +
SCROLL, no keyboard lights, no network, disk or any other
activity. Looks like a complete hardware lockup. Reboot recovers the
function.

Even the installed software-watchdog (running of the watchdog-4.4
package) did not recover the machine.

After serveral of these incidents (machine was never stable for longer
than a day), I moved to a different primary NIC (NE2000) and use the
3COM card exclusively for monitoring (with firewall-rules to prevent
output and input of frames to the primary NIC) and have no crash since
almost three days.

	Kind regards
		Henning

-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen --             hps@tanstaafl.de
TANSTAAFL! Consulting - Unix, Internet, Security      

Hutweide 15                   Fon.: 09131 / 50654-0    "There ain't no such
D-91054 Buckenhof             Fax.: 09131 / 50654-20    thing as a free Linux"