3c59x driver, "eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e401"

[Donald Becker]

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Steven Timm wrote:

> Subject: 3c59x driver, "eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e401"
...
> I have two questions:
> 
> 1) Is the message "too much work in interrupt, status E401"
> dangerous.. I seem to remember getting it in 6.1 all the time
> and things still seem to work.  But every once in a while
> we are seeing a system hang within an hour of the time one of
> these errors happen on the console

It's reporting a problem.  All of the IRQ-driven, latency sensitive
devices on the system should be reporting the problem, but my network
drivers are the pretty much the only kernel modules that check, respond
and report this type of problem.

> 2) Is the version string as given in the dmesg the correct
> way to determine the version number of the 3com driver we are running?
> Are any newer versions available, and will they help this problem?

Yes, newer driver versions are available from Scyld.  There have been
recent changes to dynamically adapt to high latency bus master grants.
But the problem you are seeing is the driver reporting a problem with
some _other_ part of the kernel, not a problem with the driver itself.

We can help you track down the problem on professional-services basis,
but I'm guessing that you are asking here because you were hoping for an
easy, one-size-fits-all answer.  The only easy answer is one that hides
the problem (e.g. changing the max_interrupt_work module parameter, or
using a driver that doesn't put out messages) rather than fixing it.


-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993