by Hi. I am having some trouble with a 3com Etherlink 16 network
card (3c507). It seems to work fine when connecting to slower
machines (such as a 386/25) but causes crashes when files are
sent from a Pentium class machine. The host has a 486 DX 4/100.
The crashes take many forms. Sometimes, the machine locks and
occasionally, the screen also goes blank. Cntl-alt-del does
not help. Sometimes, there is an Aieee, killing interrupt
handler message. At this point, the network is dead until
reboot, but the machine can still be shut down properly.
Because of the messages (Aieee type), it seems that some
memory is being freed incorrectly. There is a very suspicious
call to dev_kfree_skb(). Is there any straightforward way
to debug this problem? Does the message actually make sense,
i.e. is there really a problem with non-kmalloced memory being
kfreed? Or, can this message come from a bogus source?
I tried posting a couple of messages for help in
comp.os.linux.hardware and comp.os.linux.networking, but there
was only one answer, a suggestion to move up to version 2.0.33
of the Linux kernel. This did not help. The problem occurs
under 2.0.0, 2.0.30 and 2.0.33. Also, it occurs with both
samba and ftp. It occurs when the remote host is running either
Windows 95 or Linux, and I suspect that it will also occur with
any other OS.
At this point, I am afraid that I will need to fix this myself.
In fact, some arrogant Microsoft devotee (who claimed to have
authored a book on Windows device drivers announced to me that
you cannot run Linux without writing drivers -- incorrect).
Does anyone have any hints on how to debug this problem? I am
a relative newcomer to this field, but it would be nice to have
a working network connection. If it would help, the error
messages can be posted, but they do not always print out or
show up in the syslog.
Thanks, Eric