sungem on PowerMac G4: RX MAC fifo overflow

sungem on PowerMac G4: RX MAC fifo overflow

[Alexei Colin]

Hi,

Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated. I am emailing
netdev because I couldn't find anything relevant online (except
ancient inconclusive reports of the same error message).

Issue: system loses Ethernet connectivity after several hours usually
or sooner occasionally. This message gets written to the log multiple
times:
eht0: RX MAC fifo overflow smac[<a mem address>]

Machine: PowerMac G4 (no more firmware updates applicable)
Ethernet: 0002:20:0f.0 Ethernet controller: Apple Computer Inc.
UniNorth GMAC (Sun GEM) (rev 01)
System: Linux 2.6.31-19-powerpc #56-Ubuntu Thu Jan 28 00:50:48 UTC
2010 GNU/Linux
Driver: sungem (srcversion: 9C4DDFB8D2201E852413F4F)

I'd like to think that it started after I updated to Ubuntu 9.10
(different version of sungem), but booting into 2.6.28-6-powerpc
(after the dist upgrade, though) the same is observed.

This does bring back the network:
ifdown eth0; rmmod sungem; modprobe sungem; ifup eth0
(I never tried without reloading the module)

Please let me know if you would like me to get debugging info and
which. Thank you in advance!

Regards,
Alexei