From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Apr 27 19: 6:44 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 185DA37B422 for ; Fri, 27 Apr 2001 19:06:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 5472F6ACBC; Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:36:39 +0930 (CST) Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 11:36:39 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Munish Chopra Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Realtek 8139 NIC and IRQ problem. Message-ID: <20010428113639.B69945@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from messiah_man@hotmail.com on Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 08:55:52AM +0200 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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: 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