Re: epic100.c, SMC EtherPower II, SMC83c170/175 "EPIC"

Ingo Rohloff
2001-09-07T14:02:11Z

Hi,

I posted an error report about the epic100.c module about one
week before.
The sympotms were lot's of messages of this in /var/log/messages:
"kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x008d0004"

After one week of really frustrating debugging and incrementally
morphing the working version of the driver I got into the (for
me) non-working linux-2.4.9 version I finally found out what was
going on: the linux-2.4.9 driver has no bug!

BEWARE: DON'T USE gcc-2.95.2!
I compiled the linux-2.4.9 version with gcc-2.95.2.
And I can _definitely_ confirm that epic100.c triggers a compiler
bug. (I have the erronous assembler code on my harddisk if anyone is
interested.)

Compile the same module with gcc-2.95.3 and the bug is gone
(at least in my case. The assembler code is different and correct.)

conclusion:
Don't use gcc-2.95.2 to compile your kernel!

so long
Ingo Rohloff