[vortex] problem on debian

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Bogdan Costescu wrote:

> On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, [iso-8859-1] Jürgen Sandner wrote:
> 
> > kernel: eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e401
..
> As I often repeated on this list, the problem is that the system becomes 
> too slow to process the network packets. This might mean that the system 
> is too slow in general or that the network interrupt doesn't come through 
> when it's raised, the CPU being blocked for too long in other interrupts.

To amplify Bogdan's statement: this means that some other part of the
system is misbehaving.  Even slow machines can handle full-rate traffic
from a 3c905C if nothing else is going wrong.

> Saying the the 3Com card/driver is at fault is not realistic - as 
> you can find through search engine results, these network cards are not 
> the only ones giving this message...

Quite the opposite: the reason that other drivers(*) aren't reporting the
problem is that
  - they don't limit their resource usage to prevent other problems, and 
  - they don't check for external problems.
Most network driver messages are reporting external problems that have been
detected, not internal software failures. 

(*) It's primarily network drivers from my standard structure that do
this limit check.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
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