RE: System Hangs

I had similar problems, which were resolve by replacing faulty memory.
(Even though this memory didn't report as faulty by running memory tests
- Anyone know by the way, that Dell Poweredge machines are designed to
hang after 10 ECC Corrections).

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Childs [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2003 2:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [eepro100] System Hangs

Hi All,

Over the past 2 weeks I've had several system hangs.  The symtoms are:

- The system became unresponsive
- Analysis of the log showed the ethernet driver having a buffer problem
- The driver tries very hard to recover from the problem, but is unable
to
- Since the ethernet device is not working, the system hangs waiting for
NFS

The exact message in syslog is:
Jul  7 09:55:21 howler201 kernel: eth0: can't fill rx buffer (force 0)!
Jul  7 09:55:22 howler201 kernel: eth0: Tx ring dump,  Tx queue
479022977 / 479022977:
.... the dump follows ...

I traced through the kernel source to find that these messages will only
be generated if a call to dev_alloc_skb fails and returns NULL.  Is that
correct?

Does that mean I'm out of physical memory, or that I don't have any
skb's left (what ever they are)?

I thought if I was out of memory, the kernel would start killing
processes, and I'm not seeing anything in syslog about that happening.

I get about 35 of those can't fill rx buffer messages, and then I get:
Jul  7 10:38:38 howler201 kernel: eth0: card reports no resources.

That's when things really grind to a halt.  I can't find that message in
the kernel source.

Anyway, I'm running an IBM x330, dual 1.4Ghz cpu's.

I'm running a pretty stock 2.4.18 kernel.  The following shows up in
dmesg:

eepro100.c:v1.09j-t 9/29/99 Donald Becker
http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.html
eepro100.c: $Revision: 1.36 $ 2000/11/17 Modified by Andrey V. Savochkin
<[email protected]> and others

I know it's an old version, but I haven't had reason to upgrade.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Brian
_______________________________________________
eepro100 mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.scyld.com/mailman/listinfo/eepro100


This email and its content are subject to the disclaimer as displayed at the following link.
http://www.is.co.za/disc.asp