Re: Problems with sky2 driver.

[Daniel Drake <dsd@gentoo.org>]

Todd Showalter wrote:
>     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.

Please test with the very latest git snapshot. A critical fix was 
applied after 2.6.18-rc2 was released.

>     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?