Re: netgear fa311 NIC driver
On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> 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.
It could be the fault of a BIOS that configures the card with a too-low
PCI latency timer. "Too low" is referenced to other devices on the PCI
bus, not an absolute value.
> > 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.
It doesn't matter (much) which other devices the natsemi chip is sharing
IRQs with. The problem is any other driver which blocks interrupt service.
> > 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").
No, it doesn't. Read the source code and you'll see it was modified.
> ... 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.
I suspect the SCSI driver played a role in the problem.
Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993
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