Problems with sky2 driver.

[Todd Showalter <tshowalter@silverbirchstudios.com>]

    I've been having trouble with the sky2 driver.  It appears to work
most of the time, but it will quite often wedge during transfers.  The
2.6.17.* kernels actually seem worse than 2.6.16.19, but none of them
work perfectly.

    What typically happens is that after working perfectly for a while,
existing net connections hang, and subsequent net connections don't
seem to start at all.  firefox gets stuck with a bunch of half-loaded
pages, for instance, and I've watched an scp of a large file to a
colleague's machine stall and remain stalled.

    Once the machine is behaving this way, a reboot is the only way I
have found of recovering it.

    We have two identical machines here that are both behaving this
way, so I'm assuming it's not a hardware problem per se.  The machines
are Intel Pentium D 940 (3GHz) processors.  They have ASUS P5LD2
motherboards, with builtin Marvell PCIe 88E8053 gigabit ethernet
controllers.

    I'm not running any binary modules; it's an untainted kernel.  I'm
running a Gentoo system, but I'm using the vanilla-sources kernel (ie:
a pure kernel.org release, not the Gentoo-specific patched version).

    What can I do to help solve this?

						Todd.

--
  Todd Showalter,
  Silverbirch Studios.