RE: esp causing crashes..

[Mark Orr]

On 29-Jan-2001 Roeland Th. Jansen wrote:
> [mike -- included you for refs only]
> 
> recently I started to dive into a problem that causes 2.2.x and 2.4.x to
> crash at shutdown and when minicom/mgetty is used. e.g. shutdown almost
> always crashed the system; if a fax is received, 3 out of 4 faxes ok,
> but also crashes system.
> 
> I tried to contact the author of the hayes esp also but he seems to be
> pretty busy...
> 
> Initially I thought that killall5, mike's product, somehow caused the
> mentioned crash but diving deeper into it I found that killall5 tries to
> kill mgetty -- and crashes the system. I tried a source version as well.
> same stuff (I use suse 7.0)

I dont like to be the sort of person who, when people report problems,
fires back "it works fine here!"...but...just as a point of reference,
I have a Hayes ESP too -- it's connected to a 56k modem.  I havent
had any crashes or hangs related to it, but I dont use mgetty.  (I use
rungetty, a variant of mingetty,  for VC's).    Seeing this, I will
compile up mgetty here to see if I can replicate it.

(once in a while, communications becomes non-responsive -- but I
suspect that it's just my Zoom modem, which clams up for no apparent
reason.  The port seems to be doing it's thing.)

> the IRQ is 11, not using DMA, IRQ is set to legacy in the BIOS.
> it happens with any 2.2.xx version and also happens with 2.4.0.

I'm running 2.4.0-ac12 here.   ESP is set to 180h, IRQ 3, DMA 3.
(I disabled my onboard serial ports).   CPU is a classic Pentium.
I've been running it w/  rx_timeout=1  (the minimum usable value,
since it seems to give lower ping times)

Got this ESP off eBay -- in fact, I got it after reading Mr. Jansen's
recommendation 2 years ago in the comp.dcom.* groups (probably ISDN),
noting how flexible and tweakable the ESP drivers are.  FWIW, I was
getting mountains of TCP errors before I got this card, and they all
disappeared once I installed the ESP.  It's an amazing card.

--
Mark Orr
[e-mail]