Re: EEPro100 problems in SMP on 2.4.5 ?

[Andrew Morton <andrewm@uow.edu.au>]

Dylan Griffiths wrote:
> 
>         Hi.  While doing some file tranfers to our new server (a Compaq Proliant
> 8way XEON 500 with 4gb ram and an EEPro100 NIC), the box socked solid (no
> oops, no response via network, no response via console).  The other hardware
> in the system was a Compaq Smart Array 9SMART2 driver).  It's running
> Slackware 7.1.  The other system was a dual P3 450 running Redhat 7.1 (Linux
> velocity.kuro5hin.org 2.4.2-2smp #1 SMP Sun Apr 8 20:21:34 EDT 2001 i686
> unknown) w/ 3c59x NIC.  The Redhat machine experienced no problems.
>         In Uni processor mode, the system is totally stable.  But only using 1/8th
> of its power :-/  We had to roll back to 2.2.19 with a bigmem patch, but
> we'd like to have a stable 2.4 kernel to use (since it's so much better SMP
> wise, throughput wise, etc).

Some things to try:

1: Include `magic sysrq' support in the kernel and use ALT-SYSRQ-T and S
   when it has locked up.   If you get some traces then please feed them
   into `ksymoops -m System.map' and report back.

2: If the above doesn't work, add `nmi_watchdog=1' to the kernel boot
   options.  That may catch the lockup.

3: Replace the NIC with another eepro100.  If the problem goes away then
   chuck the old one.

4: Replace the NIC with one of a different type (ie: swap with the other
   machine). If that fixes it we look at the ethernet driver.  Otherwise
   we look at, umm, the rest of the kernel.

-