Toshiba Libretto 70CT ep0 intermittent

[Julian H. Stacey]

I started this thread on current@ as
  Subject: 5.3-RC1 attempt with a Toshiba Libretto 70CT failed, 4.10 OK 
But it evolved to be ep0 intermittent on 4.10-RELEASE, so moved to mobile at .
I don't know if Ruben de Groot <mail25 at bzerk.org> is on mobile@ so please
don't drop him off CC: unless he says he is. He has same problem I do.

Ruben de Groot wrote (Re. my mail about installing):
> > BTW on 4.10 The ftp through ep0 ethernet chugs along at 1 K byte / sec !
> > & expires half way through load of /bin
> > & Ive used that pcmcia ether card with FBSD before, its OK,
> > so it's the libretto.
> 
> I had the same kind of problems on my Libretto 70CT and a 3Com 3CCFE574BT.
> After the installation (5.1 and 4.9) over SLIP, the NIC kept giving me
> extremely low throughput. I did a little testing:

Now multi user on 4.10 I still see intermittent ep0 freezes:
I've also tried 2 other ether cards since, another 3com 589, (with
same external BNC & UTP transducer) & a 3com Office Connect 3CXSH572BT
with an X Jack UTP connection: All cards behave OK with FreeBSD
elsewhere, I've also tried with UTP & co ax, all my other hosts ping OK.


> Pinging from the libretto to another system, both running tcpdump, would
> give normal results on the other system (1 ICMP request arriving every 
> second, 1 reply being send back).
> On the Libretto however, the replies would not show up in the tcpdump
> trace for a long time, sometimes over 60 seconds, after which I would
> see a "burst" of replies in a few seconds, but a lot of them never 
> showed up at all. 
> So it looks like the problem was in the receive side of the NIC/driver.

I see on remote host (name=flip) with "tcpdump -i ed0 host lapl" both 
	"icmp: echo request" * "icmp: echo reply"
I see on libretto host (name=lapl) with "tcpdump -i ep0 host flip" just
	"icmp: echo request"
Perhaps this means the interrupt on receive is lost ?

> The hardware is fine btw; the Linux driver has no problems with this
> configuration.

I'm still learning /boot/loader.conf
(copies of syntax I'm thinking of periodically go to
	http://berklix.org/~jhs/hw/toshiba/libretto.70ct/boot/loader.conf
but I might even have correct stuff there, then delete again in error,
it's hard to decide what belongs there.)

I guess we need some loader.conf magic !
Warner or someone have some suggestions please ?

-
Julian Stacey.  Unix,C,Net & Sys. Eng. Consultant, Munich.  http://berklix.com
Mail in Ascii, Html dumped as Spam.  Ihr Rauch = mein allergischer Kopfschmerz.