Re: 2.0 kernels, tulip driver, crashes and reboots (long)

Al Youngwerth (alberty@apexxtech.com)
Sun, 10 Jan 1999 11:18:04 -0700


At 04:00 AM 1/10/99 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
>> An alternative driver that works with most Tulip cards (but maybe not some
>> of the newer clones) is the de4x5.c driver. I'd check it out - we had
>> stability problems with tulip.c and swapping it for de4x5.c sorted them
>> out.
>
>The older tulip driver blows up under certain memory conditions (fixed
>by 0.89H) when certain variants get overlarge packets (fixed in 0.89K
>I believe) and when some clones hand back crazy size reports (ditto).
>
>0.90 seems to work very well unless you have a VIA chipset.
>
>> > 3) 10 systems with ne2000 cards and the 2.0.36 kernel in them reboot but
>> > don't lockup.
>>
>> Heh. Seen that. Glad to know it wasn't just us.
>
>I've never seen a real NE2000 reboot a machine, and I have a lot. I've seen
>several clones that crash, lock the ISA bus and then hang the machine
>totally solidly or on some brighter boards cause the chipset to reboot
>the system.
>
>These would be 10 winbonds by any chance ?

10 Winbonds? I presume your talking about the chipset on the ne2000 clone?
No, the card is made by Wisecom and uses the Davicom DM9008F chipset. These
ne2000s have been very reliable for us.

Interesting data point from over the weekend: on the advice from someone on
the tulip list, I put two machines on an isolated 10/100 hub. I ran netperf
between two of the machines. When I got in this morning (Sunday), the two
systems running netperf had rebooted. The system running the netperf
server, rebooted about 5:00pm Friday. The system that was running the
netperf client rebooted at 8:00am this morning (I came in around 11am).
(After the server rebooted, the client errored out for a while and then
began the test again when the server came back online.)

This appears to be the best way yet to make these things fail. I've got to
run right now but I'll come in later tonight and setup some more netperf
tests: between systems running the ne2000 clones and some systems we have
with the Intel chipset.

I'll post when I learn more...

Thanks,

Al Youngwerth
alberty@apexxtech.com

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