On Fri, 12 Dec 1997, Christopher R. Bowman wrote:
> Yes MACE5 is giving me lots of collision errors, but seems to work despite
> them as I have ftp'd all the BETA source and bin tarballs including the
> xsrc which has got to be close to 113 Megs of data with out other problems
> or crashes.  I am recompileing a kernel now on my 660av to see if this will
> go away before I look throught the sources.

The AMD LANCE driver (am7990.c) doesn't print collision errors at all,
and only prints framing errors and checksum errors if compiled with
debug info turned on. The MACE driver prints them, but I'm thinking of
changing it to match what the LANCE driver does, since it sounds like
they can occur fairly frequently under normal use. Note that "collision
error" isn't the same as a collision... if the driver notices a
collision, it just increments the collision counter (the "Coll" column
of "netstat -i") without printing any error message. I have no idea what
a "collision error" is, but according to the docs:

     CERR indicates the absence of the Signal Quality Error Test (SQE
     Test) message after a packet transmission. The SQE Test message
     is a transceiver test feature. Detection depends on the MACE
     network interface selected. In all cases, CERR will be set if the
     MACE device failed to observe the SQE Test message within 20
     network bit times after the packet transmission ended.

The only time I've seen a collision error message is when I tried to
send packets with the transceiver unplugged, but I'm on an idle network.
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