Network problems with VIA chipset and Athlon XP

[Dean Johnson]

On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 04:39, Claudio Martins wrote:
> 
> Hi all
> 
>   We have a set of systems that become network unreachable, presenting the 
> following messages in dmesg output, repeated at aprox. 5 sec. intervals:
> 
> NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
> eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc664010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
> NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
> eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc684010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
> eth0: Out-of-sync dirty pointer, 34067 vs. 34084.
> NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
> eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc664010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
> NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
> eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc684010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
> NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
> eth0: Transmit timed out, status fc684010, CSR12 00000000, resetting...
> eth0: Out-of-sync dirty pointer, 34089 vs. 34106.
> 

Related to me by someone infinitely more knowledgable than I, this is
often the sign of a poor quality NIC. Perhaps an old wives tale, but
when I started getting them on some of my key boxes at home, I swapped
in better NICs and the "problem" went away. My home network obviously
isn't as dependent on high network performance as a cluster, but it was
a cheap solution to something that was vexing me.

	-Dean