NETDEV timeout on tulips [was: Re: 2.4.1-test10]

[David Ford]

> > Do the tulip driver updates address the increasingly common NETDEV timeout
> > repots?
>
> In general you can answer this yourself by reading
> drivers/net/tulip/ChangeLog.
>
> I don't see increasingly common timeout reports.. with which hardware?
> They are likely on the newer LinkSys 4.1 cards, and there are still
> problesm with PNIC.  Outside of that, other cards should be ok.

I have four machines now that exhibit this problem.  Three have in them the
Linksys card family, similar PCI cards, one is my laptop which I have three
different cardbus cards but they all use the tulip driver.

In the PCI situation, not all machines using these cards act the same way.
I got a 10 pack of LNE100TX cards and so far only two out of the batch are doing
this, they are all the same revision, identical in every way that I've found.

The three cardbus cards are slightly different in numerous ways.  For them they
normally fault with an APM event, an eject/insert cycle via software will reset
them and a link down/up won't fix it.  For the PCI cards most times a link
down/up cycle will fix them.  It's a 2.4 v.s. 2.2 issue, the 2.2 kernels aren't
exhibiting this error.

The PCI cards are hard to get into this state, sometimes they'll run millions of
packets for months on end before they'll burp.  Sometimes it'll happen three
times a night.  The amount of traffic doesn't seem to matter, nor does the type
of traffic.

00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Lite-On Communications Inc LNE100TX (rev 20)
        Subsystem: Netgear FA310TX
        Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr-
Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
        Status: Cap- 66Mhz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort-
<TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
        Latency: 64 set
        Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 9
        Region 0: I/O ports at 6400 [size=256]
        Region 1: Memory at e4000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
        Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=256K]

I say increasingly common because the more machines I bring on with 2.4 v.s. 2.3
or testNN kernels, the more the systems burp on this.  I.e. a kernel from 6
months ago takes 2-3 months to burp.  Last week's kernel burps once a week.

-d

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