Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:36:39 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Munish Chopra <messiah_man@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Realtek 8139 NIC and IRQ problem. Message-ID: <20010428113639.B69945@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <F59kLQ8aZRhQdOgl4rh00005c76@hotmail.com>; from messiah_man@hotmail.com on Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 08:55:52AM %2B0200 References: <F59kLQ8aZRhQdOgl4rh00005c76@hotmail.com>
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On Friday, 27 April 2001 at 8:55:52 +0200, Munish Chopra wrote: >> I wonder how good our RealTek driver is. > > It's written by Bill Paul, who is (as far is I know and have heard) actually > more than 'just decent' at writing drivers. The driver seems to work fine > too, but the card just screws things up every chance it gets. Bill's a good programmer, no doubt. But he can't outguess the manufacturers if he doesn't get the documentation he needs. For example, I had a case recently with an el cheapo card which had slightly different specs from others of its ilk: dc0: <Macronix 98715AEC-C 10/100BaseTX> port 0xc400-0xc4ff mem 0xeb000000-0xeb0000ff irq 3 at device 9.0 on pci0 dc0: Ethernet address: 00:80:c6:f9:d3:fa The symptoms were that the card would appear to go to sleep, and you couldn't contact the machine. If you were on the machine, however, things would work a while and then freeze up again. It turned out that this card had a subtle difference in the multicast hash table: it was only 128 bits instead of 512. This stopped it receiving broadcast messages, such as ARP requests. Bill added a fix for it, and we have seen no problems since. It's quite possible that the RealTek driver has similar issues. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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