Re: 2.4.16 freezed up with eepro100 module

[Nathan Poznick <poznick@conwaycorp.net>]

Thus spake Sven Heinicke:
> 
> I have eepro100's on other systems and never had a problem.  They
> never have been made to work as hard as the DELLs though.  I am
> trying the same DELL with a 3C996-T 1000Bt card using the driver from
> 3COM (we plan on moving that system to a 1000Bt system but the switch
> hasn't arrived yet) and it is running at 100Bt with the same
> software.  If you don't hear form me assume it surrived.  Been up a
> day so far, took the DELL like 3 days of heavy use to crash before.

Ok, I finally had a chance to work on this, and here's what I know:

1) I found a workload under which I was able to reliably make the
network on the machine die (a few hundred of the "eth0: card reports
no resources." errors showed up which continued until I took down the
network and removed the module).  Unfortunately, the workload was with
an in-house app, so all I can describe are the conditions associated
with it: 2 processes with a total of about 600 threads, 1.5gb of
memory, about 500 network connections, and a lot of disk and network
I/O. 

2) I switched from using the eepro100 module to using intel's e100
module, and I was unable to reproduce the problem, even under a
heavier load than before.  Haven't seen so much as a peep about eth0
problems in the logs since I switched over.

So for now, I'll be sticking with the e100 driver, since it appears to
have solved my problem (at least for now).

-- 
Nathan Poznick <poznick@conwaycorp.net>
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"This is wild, I swear..."
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