[eepro100] Re: 82559 and receiver lock-up bug.

Frederick Barnes frmb2@ukc.ac.uk
Wed, 05 Jul 2000 11:06:50 +0100


Hi,

>     Has any one ever hit the receiver lock-up bug? 

yup, experiencing it quite a lot at the moment :(

> A multicast command to the adapter is a workaround to this
> bug. If you are doing a rcp of a very big file (> 1 GB file)
> does this work around help? My driver locked up many times 
> during a large file transfer.
> 
> Any input on what causes this bug to appear is greatly 
> appreciated.

I've got a user-space driver talking to the eepro100 board (82557b,
82558 flavoured boards), with flow-control on (any combination of
PHY based or transmit based flow-control).

If the board runs out of receive descriptors, the flow-control
packets tell the sender to stop sending, but when the boards gets
some more receive descriptors back, it doesn't start receiving again
as it should -- it just stops dead.  :-(.  Definitely undesirable.

Is there any way to detect that it's about to lock-up, before it
actually does ?  In the usual fashion, the 82558 data-sheets aren't
very helpful.  I'd rather not go for a time-out option, as this
will make the performance (throughput) suffer somewhat.


Cheers,
  Fred
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