Kernel oops with 2.3.[39-40] + 0.91x

[Kevin M. Myer]

Hello,

Relevant info:

RedHat 6.1
AMD K6-2 400Mhz processor
FIC 503+ Motherboard
128Mb PC100 DRAM
Kingston KNE-100TX ethernet card

I've been using Donald Becker's kern-2.3 drivers, in this case, the Tulip
0.91x driver.  The card comes up ok and everything works fine for awhile
and then my network connection will freeze.  Sometimes there's a message
about eth0 being hung but more often than not, the logs show no indication
that anything is wrong.  Often, I can just restart the interface and
everything continues.  However, about 25% of the time, I get a kernel oops
when I do this (see below) .  All further attempts to use ifconfig
generate this oops including (obviously) the one in the shutdown script.  
This results in me having to do a hard reboot, with the obligitory
looooong fsck.

On a perhaps related note, I also appear to have some SCSI related
hardware problems, wherein the bus is reset way too often.  From a purely
anecdotal viewpoint, it seems my SCSI problems and ethernet card problems
exacerbate one another, although it might be purely coincidence.  I don't
know if this sheds any light on the problem or not.

I know that kernel 2.3.X is winding down and is mostly in a feature
freeze.  It would seem, however, that Donald's 2.3.X ethernet drivers,
haven't had the chance to undergo a lot of testing, since they haven't
even been included in the official kernel release yet.  I know that to use
my Tulip card, I need at least a 0.91g driver - the 0.89H driver won't
work.  So is the idea to ship a 2.4 kernel that supports a bunch of older
cards but not many of the newer ones?  

The oops:

Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 80000073
 printing eip:
c01f2298
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0002
CPU:    0
EIP:    0010:[<c01f2298>]
EFLAGS: 00010206
eax: 00000000   ebx: 00000000   ecx: c9006000   edx: 7fffffff
esi: 00000000   edi: c126fb00   ebp: c9006000   esp: c30adeb4
ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018
Process ifconfig (pid: 1227, stackpage=c30ad000)
Stack: c9006030 c126f800 c9006030 c01f23e1 c1276400 0000000a c1276400
c126fc98
       00001043 c1276400 00001042 00000000 c018a7b2 c1276400 00001043
c1276400
       c018b2b5 c1276400 c1276400 00008914 00000000 c30adf4c c018b3ce
c1276400
Call Trace: [<c01f23e1>] [<c018a7b2>] [<c018b2b5>] [<c018b3ce>]
[<c018b89e>] [<c01b3e47>] [<c0186cd1>]
       [<c0137a57>] [<c010be64>]
Code: ff 4a 74 0f 94 c0 84 c0 74 09 52 e8 44 6e f9 ff 83 c4 04 c7

The contents of /proc/net/dev

Inter-|   Receive
 face |bytes    packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast
  eth0: 2962783   18446    0    0    0     0          0         0
 dummy:       0       0    0    0    0     0          0         0
    lo:   14399     225    0    0    0     0          0         0

  Transmit
bytes    packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
 1064134   15542   16    0    0     0       0          0
       0       0    0    0    0     0       0          0
   14399     225    0    0    0     0       0          0

Thanks,

Kevin

-- 
     ~        Kevin M. Myer
    . .       Network/System Administrator
    /V\       ELANCO School District
   // \\
  /(   )\
   ^`~'^






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