rtl8139-diag program.

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 09:05:15AM +0100, Nicolae_Popovici at mksinst.com wrote:
> >   I am trying to use the rtl8139-diag program
> Is it still the case that these cards lock up under heavy use in Linux
> and Windows? They're cheap in more than one way.

That's a little like the phrase "are you still beating your wife".

There are tens of millions of rtl8139 chips out there, and almost all
configurations work.
You don't hear from the people with working systems, only from the ones
that don't work.

Some revs of the chip acted differently than others.  With bad match of
PCI timing (it's not clear if it's the NIC or motherboard, but it's the
combination that is bad) the forwarding pointers on the Rx ring would be
corrupted.

The result was some combinations would run reliably at 100% load, while
there were problem machines where nothing but frequent full resets would
allow continued operation.

-- 
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