quad de, flakiness with 3.9

David Terrell <dbtmeat.net> wrote:

> Since upgrading to 3.9 I've been having a problem with
flakiness from
> my older PCI quad ethernet card.  de3 here is a dhcp
interface (crappy
> SBC DSL), de2 and de1 are internal (wired and
wireless).
> 
> the symptoms of failure are that de3 will stop sending
packets.
> tcpdump doesn't show outgoing transmissions, dhclient
complains
> "out of buffer space", and even without any
active transmissions
> ifconfig shows OACTIVE in the interface flags.
> 
> (the machine is up at the moment so I don't have that
ifconfig handy, 
> sorry).
> 
> One other thing I notice is that when I do ask it to do
autonegotiate
> it floods the network with requests, but a hardcode to
100baseTX doesn't
> work (I don't exactly have a managed switch on the
other end) and 
> 10baseT complains that there is no carrier in ifconfig
status and 
> dhclient won't run.
> 
> Any ideas?  Simply bad hardware?  This was working fine
with 3.8 and
> even a 3.9 snapshot from two months ago before the CDs
arrived monday
> and I did the upgrade.

Give the dc(4) driver a shot instead.