>Number:         24598
>Category:       port-i386
>Synopsis:       NE2000 driver unreliable
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    port-i386-maintainer
>State:          open
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Sun Feb 29 06:07:00 UTC 2004
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     James Burton
>Release:        1.6.2RC4
>Organization:
>Environment:
NetBSD artworks 1.6.2 NetBSD 1.6.2 (JARTZ) #0: Sun Feb 29 13:44:33 EST 2004     james@artworks:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/JARTZ i386

>Description:
About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 1.5 to 1.6.1
and ever since then I have had regular lockups. The result is I 
can't get any sort of response from the machine and have to press the reset
button. There are 2 sure-fire ways of causing this immediately.

1. start an XDMCP client pointed at it's xdm server (e.g. from my WinXP box run
Cygwin/Xfree in XDMCP client mode)

2. access any web page with a CGI behind it hosted on Mr. Crashy's httpd.

It will also periodially lock itself when I've looked at lots of photos
from the web server or played a lot of mp3 over samba etc.

Seems by behaviour to be related to network activity.
Yesterday morning I upgraded to 1.6.2RC4 in vain hope of it going away.
I've just run memtest for nearly 2 hours and found no memory probs.
A few weeks ago I re-compiled a kernel with kernel debugger in
and wasn't able to get it to drop into the debugger after the lockup.

I replaced the ISA NE2000 clone with a NetGear FA311 this afternoon
and all the problems went away (except for a SILO underrun which I'll
ask about elsewhere. So my suspicion is that some housekeeping has
damaged the NE driver since the 1.5* releases.

Thanks,
James

>How-To-Repeat:
use the network card :-(
>Fix:
use a different network card :-)
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: