Re: EtherExpress 16 stall fix
Jean Tourrilhes (jt@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Fri, 27 Jun 1997 17:01:29 +0100 (BST)
Mark Hemment <markhe@sco.COM> :
> Hi,
>
> I had to swap my network card for an EtherExpress16, and noticed than
> when I was ftp'ing _into_ my box (from a local machine) the transfer would
> stall. The ftp was the only network traffic.
>
> It appears that the networking layer calls the driver's xmit function
> when 'tbusy' is set. For the eexpress, this caused the cards interrupts
> to be disabled, but not immediately re-enabled. Hence the stall.
>
> The attached patch (against 2.1.43) solves the problem. Please note,
> the "udelay(50)" appears necessary on my box or else I get some (not many)
> tx-interrupts with no status. (Infact, I still do get some under heavy
> transmit, but no longer for receive).
>
> Could anyone with this card, confirm they see this problem and the patch
> fixes it. Thanks.
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> - -----------------------------------------------------
> Mark Hemment UNIX/C Software Engineer (contractor)
> "Success has many fathers. Failure is a b**tard"
> - -----------------------------------------------------
> markhe
>
> PS: I couldn't find any doc on the i82586 online. Does anyone have any
> references?
The Wavelan adapter use the i82586 as well, but only on the
ISA bus and only in PIO mode (no memory sharing and no busmaster). The
Wavelan driver is quite readable and documented (I'm not saying that
because I'm the current maintainer :-).
As far as I remember, I never had to insert such a kludge in
the driver (The Wavelan is only 2 Mb/s, that could make all the
difference). I don't have tested it with 2.1.43, but the driver was
pretty solid in the 2.1 serie. Note that the driver implement some
nice features (like hardware multicast) that no other i82586 driver
was implementing last time I checked.
If you could have a look and tell me what you think...
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Mark Hemment UNIX/C Software Engineer (contractor)
> "Success has many fathers. Failure is a b**tard"
> -----------------------------------------------------
Jean