[tulip] Re: problem with tulip card ceasing to function - requires ifup/ifdown to fix

[Donald Becker]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, [iso-8859-1] Alexander Haväng wrote:

> We suspect there might be something in the driver that makes it
> unaware of rx/tx problems.

The driver doesn't correctly recover from the simultaneous occurrence of
an empty receive ring and a no-memory condition in the kernel.

> If we leave the max_interrupt_work at 25, and set debug to max, we see
> a lot of "too much work during interrupt" messages,

That makes some sense -- the machine is doing much more work logging the
messages.

> and increasing that variable gets rid of the warning, but not the
> problem.

The problem is related to the kernel's poor memory management.  A good
first step to change the kernel's parameters for how much available
memory to keep around.  The following setting avoids the problem for
most environments:

echo "500 1000 2000" > /proc/sys/vm/freepages 

Please send a report is this modifies your problem.

Donald Becker				becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993