rtl8139 problems

James Stevens James.Stevens@jrcs.co.uk
Fri Sep 4 10:49:16 1998


Some good news.... But first ....

I just remembered, to get it to crash as quickly as possible, I client
to the 8139 system from a different machine than is it clienting to. The
client system [to the 8139] is a 120x486 with an NE2000. So :-

120x486             P75                P75
[     ] <-- Data -- [   ]  <-- Data -- [     ]
NE2000              8139               NE2000

All systems are running Linux 2.0.33.

8139 can run open_socket reading from P75 fine for a reasonable while (I
have not seen it fail). Almost as soon as 486 starts running open_socket
to 8139, 8139 starts getting Tx errors, throughput drops like a stone
for a few seconds then the ethernet jams, but the system itself is fine. 

I have just tried the v1.02 and it still suffers from the same problem
with one excpetion (this is the good news). The network adaptor will,
given time, recover, instead of just jamming solid, but only after the
486 stops trying to talk to the 8139 system. 

If I replace the 8139 with an NE2000 all works fine. I have also tried
the 8139 in an A-Bit PR5 motherboard with a P75 and a A-Bit PX5 with a
P200 and it makes no difference.

FYI: on the P200 reading at 1,080,000 bytes/s (of user data) the CPU is
1% busy (99% idle) !!!!

James
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