network problem: ep driver captures packets not intended for this host

[zoltan sandor]

Hi all!

It would be nice if somebody could give me some advice
on the following problem. I am using FreeBSD 4.8 on a
Sony Vaio laptop with a 3COM Fast Etherlink 16-bit
PC CARD (3c574-Tx).

dmesg says:
ep0: <3Com 3C574> at port 0x240-0x25f irq 9 flags 0x1
slot 0 on pccard0
ep0: Ethernet address 00:60:08:b3:cc:1a

With this setup the card usually works well. However
from time to time the whole systems slows down to a
crawl. The problem goes away if I pull the network
plug. During slow down top shows that the processor
spends >90% of the time in interrupt mode.

It seems the problem is with the ethernet interface
ep0. Ifconfig says:
ep0:
flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu
1500
inet6 fe80::260:8ff:feb3:cc1a%ep0 prefixlen 64
scopeid 0x6 
inet 10.10.6.39 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast
10.10.6.255
ether 00:60:08:b3:cc:1a

>From this I see that my ip address is 10.10.6.39 and
the card is not in promiscuous mode. Still when I use
tcpdump -p it shows all the packets coming and going
to an other machine on the subnet with ip address
10.10.6.20. This machine generates a heavy traffic
which is passed to my kernel by the ep0 driver.
Is this the normal behaviour of the system and is
there
any way to drop these packets at the ep0 driver level?

Thanks for any suggestions

Zoltan Sandor

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