Re: Driver for via-velocity gigabit NIC

On Mar 6, 2006, at 8:29 PM, Timothy Legge wrote:
> Hi
> I have a working version of a driver for the via-velocity 6120  
> based cards.

Nice.  Is this a chip that is on standalone PCI cards or something  
that is more on motherboards only?

> The only problem is that it is only working on 5.2.  With 5.4, it  
> causes a computer reset on a dual opteron machine and causes an old  
> Pentium to freeze.
> I am currently at a loss as to why.  I imagine it is the result of  
> some  bug or another but I have never seen a driver work on one  
> version and fail so badly on another.
> The bug manifests itself on the first or second go through the  
> transmit function and it seems to fail part way though.
> Does anyone have any quick thought on obvious things to review?

Well, the two things that come to mind are interrupts and the  
transmit/receive buffer structure.

How many buffers have you allocated, and are they in a ring structure  
with the usual polling?

It sounds like your code might be getting walked on, possibly by a  
stray pointer.  It's really easy to forget an '&', and since the  
memory management is very different between the versions, it's very  
easy to see how the problem might manifest itself differently between  
versions.  The 5.4 build systems is pretty different in the way it  
uses ld to make the image.
I suspect that printing out the transmit and receive buffer pointer  
addresses may be helpful.

Can you drop the driver somewhere where we can take a look at it?

Marty




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