After 3 days of experiments I still experience tx timeout errors with 3c900.
Is there something rotten in 3c900, and should I get card from another brand?
System: P2/350, ABIT, PCI slots with Adaptec 2490 SCSI card,
Mystique and 3C900 on 10baseT. pretty standard, I'd say.
I checks the 10baseT cables and they looked ok (and they work...
at least most of the time).
O/S: Linux redhat 5.1 with 3c59x.c:v0.99E 5/12/98
There is no other O/S on this machine (especially no win95/98)
Observation:
- if the Adaptec 2490 is put close to the 3c900, the tx time-out happen
within 5 minutes.
kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0x6800,
00:60:08:bd:b8:d3, IRQ 9
kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e800.
kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e000.
kernel: eth0: Tx Ring full, refusing to send buffer.
- if there is an empty PCI slot next to the 3c900, the tx time-out happens
within a few hours. Removing the Adaptec SCSI card doesn't improve the
situation.
- If I remove routed and named from the system (because they regularly send
broadcasts)
the tx time-out still happen, but it take around 36 hours - unfortunately a
Linux server isn't
supposed to reboot once a day, countrary to NT.
kernel: eth0: 3Com 3c900 Boomerang 10Mbps/Combo at 0x6800,
00:60:97:6e:62:04, IRQ 9
kernel: eth0: Host error, FIFO diagnostic register 2000.
kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status 8000.
kernel: eth0: transmit timed out, tx_status 00 status e800.
- I tried to stuff in a 3c509 combo in this PC but it never accepted to work
with 10 base T.
Trying to re-configure it with isapnp failed, even though the card replies to
pnpdump.
So I really have to use the 3c900.
- I have two HP vectra PPro/200 (HP motherboard) that somehow accept to work
with 3c900.
They are running RedHat 4.2, with 3c59x.c:v0.46C 10/14/97.
From time to times, at boot, the 3c900 reports a PCI device ID of 0000
instead of 5900, and it takes
a power shutdown to resotre the right ID.
My conclusions:
- The 3c900 have a problem with PCI, or maybe a problem with some PCI
motherboards.
They seem to be much too sensitive to the presence of other devices on the
PCI bus.
- There might be a problem with the current 3c59x driver, that wasn't present in
version v0.46c.
Unfortunately there are too many diffs for me to understand the changes.
- It would be cool if the driver documented the status registers, in the source
code
or directly in the kernel messages. Where can the 3c900 docs be obtained?
Olivier Montanuy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 12 2000 - 12:00:34 EST