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Re: netgear fa311 NIC driver



On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 10:54:18PM -0400, Donald Becker wrote:
> >  However, it is
> > > behaving strangely.  I repeatedly get the error message:
> > > 
> > > eth1: Something Wicked Happened! 18000
> 
> Hmmm, the Rx status steck overflowed.
> I don't see this with my driver release.
> This is very unusual -- either the driver misconfigured the chip, or the
> chip couldn't get any PCI bus bandwidth to transfer Rx descriptors.

Could that be the fault of a buggy BIOS or chipset?  For what it's
worth, I saw this problem on both a FIC PA2013 motherboard (I forget the
pci chipset used there) and an ABIT KT7A with a VIA Apollo KT133
chipset.

> > I can't tell if it is a bug in the National Semiconductor chip on the
> > card or with the driver.  From what I was able to determine, it has
> > something to do with IRQ sharing, though I'm not totally sure what.
> 
> That's pretty unlikely, unless the interrupt is blocked for a really
> long time.  That's a problem with another driver on the system, not with
> sharing IRQs.

Interesting.  I should swap the card back in and see which other devices
the card is sharing IRQs with.  I did move it to a different slot at one
pointin an attempt to make sure it was sharing interrupts with different
devices, but maybe it still got stuck sharing with a buggy driver.

> > Between this bug and the natsemi driver's broken multicast support,
> 
> It was broken on my initial version, but I fixed it.  The broken version
> was apparently ported to 2.4.

Woohoo!!!!!  It's great to hear that there's working multicast support
available.

> > I've spent a good deal of time looking at the driver.  I was never able to
> > solve the problem, though, and eventually stopped trying as it was
>
> As usual, my primary reply is that I don't support modified drivers.  If
> you touch it, you should be willing to test and maintain the whole
> driver.
> I will debug problems that you can reproduce on an original driver.

I had no trouble duplicating the problem in the original driver
(assuming, of course, that the version of natsemi.c included in Linux
2.4 counts as "original").  I didn't start hacking on the driver until I
experienced this problem.  As I said, I experienced it with two
different motherboards, and now there's another person here on
debian-user experiencing the same problem.  In my case, most of the PCI
cards were common between the two motherboards, so I'm not ruling out
the idea that the natsemi card was sharing an IRQ with a misbehaved
driver.  There was a SCSI card in the configuration (using the
sym53c8xx driver), so that may have been involved.  But as I said, I
don't know right now which cards were sharing IRQs.

noah

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