Re: Ethernet card locking up when acting as virtual bridge

[David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com>]

On 11/09/17 09:55, Dan Ritter wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 03:21:00PM -0800, David Christensen wrote:
> > On 11/08/17 02:54, Andrew Wood wrote:
> > > 3Com Etherlink Model 3C905C
> >
> > That card is *old* -- it brings back memories. :-)  And, 3Com is gone. Is
> > there any FOSS support for 3Com stuff?
>
> This is one of the classic fast-ethernet cards, supported by the original
> Beowulf cluster implementation:
>
> http://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/brahma/Resources/beowulf/linux/drivers/vortex.html
>
> One would expect that any bugs left in the kernel driver
> (net/ethernet/3com/3c59x.ko) would be hammered flat by now.

Kernel changes can and do break device drivers -- I wrote a driver for 
Linux 2.4.18 back in the day; it broke on 2.4.19.


The grim reality is that everything has to be re-validated on every 
kernel release.


> kernel.org says it's had four changes in the last year.

Good -- the OP's hardware *is* supported on Linux.  :-)


So, the next place to look is configuration settings.  It looks like 
Christian Seiler provided some good advice.


David