Re: RTL-Poll Error and <sleep> for ever

[Marty Connor <mdc@thinguin.org>]

On 1/16/2000 1:59 PM dirk@goe.net Dirk von Suchodoletz wrote:
>The machine got it dhcp answer (IP, network etc.) and then tried to get
>its boot image but without success (other machines got it from the same
>server so tftpd should be OK). After a reboot all was fine ...

Could you try loading from a floppy to see if this has anything to do 
with the code being in BIOS flash.

Can you also try setting the RAM speed slower (70ns?) in your BIOS 
config?  I am wondering if the BUS speed is too fast for these PCI cards, 
or if this is some PCI 2.x compatibility bug.  See also if there is a 
setting for BUS wait states or something that will slow things down a bit 
for the card.  What speed (CPU/BUS) are these machines, btw?  The driver 
code does have some timing related considerations.

Did DEBUG-RX yield anything more specific on the nature of the 
Poll-Error?  I note in the Changelog for rtl8139.c there is mention of 
receive code bugs being fixed. I can't reproduce the problem, so it may 
be the card, the server, the BIOS, the driver, the LAN, or something we 
haven't thought of.  We might have to insert a "sleep(2);" call after the 
error message so it doesn't scroll by too fast.

The fact that a reboot seems to fix things suggests that the card might 
not be fully initialized before the receive is attempted or something 
timing related. The main obvious difference I see right now is that 
you're running code from BIOS Flash and I'm doing ROMs and floppies.  I 
should get one of these flashable motherboards so I can test this sort of 
thing.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour with rtl8139s in 4.4.x?

Regards,

Marty

---
   Name: Martin D. Connor
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