any solution for the sky2 driver for Marvell 8056 - Page 2

HappyTux · 05-01-2007, 01:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shortwh

As PCIe can get very unhappy about overclocking, is there a chance that the people having trouble or overclocking the PCIe bus and not realizing it? Or maybe Gigabyte or others have trace problems? I also have the Asus P5B Deluxe and I have "hammered" this chip without problems. 70+MB/s sustained in and out with connections to 2 different end points without a crash. I will be leaving this driver in for my 2.6.21.1 kernel. Thanks to all who left comments.

There is an option in my bios and I believe the others in the series that lets you set the pci-e bus locked to 100mhz. I have my chip overclocked to about 2.5ghz with the FSB running at 357mhz (stock voltages and timings) everything runs great it is rock solid even with the dirt cheap generic ram I have in it. I ended up cueing up enough files to run for almost two days straight at the pretty much the max my connection will do (about 600K/sec) it went without any problems then transfered like ~30gb back and forth between my mac and this machine still no problems.

HappyTux · 05-01-2007, 01:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by steve-alexander

OK - these lines were added to the sky2 driver [../linux.../driver/net/sky2.c

between 2.6.20.10 and 2.6.21

I just modified this driver in the 2.6.21.1 kernel by adding the line
#define broken sja
as the first line.

I just comment out the section the card has worked fine ever since.

steve-alexander · 05-02-2007, 06:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeenam

The common thread with the posters on the gentoo forum who claim they have the sky2 driver working is they are not hammering the connection hard enough. Load up a bittorrent app such as rtorrent and try to push 200KB/s up and 50KB/s down. Within 48 hours, a network card using the sky2 driver will lock the entire system.

I just did this - ran KTorrent hard for almost 24 hours - no problems !

I would like to hear exactly what hardware pthe problem appears on. I have had no problems attributable to the sky2/8056 on my ASUS P5B-Deluxe.

Quote:

commit 0a17e4c252ce951615f3c1fccae6d6262c8d4187
Author: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed Apr 11 14:47:58 2007 -0700

sky2: disable support for 88E8056

This device is having all sorts of problems that lead to data corruption
and system instability. It gets receive status and data out of order,
it generates descriptor and TSO errors, etc.

Until the problems are resolved, it should not be used by anyone
who cares about there system.

Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>

jeenam · 05-02-2007, 11:06 AM

Newer motherboards offer the option to lock the PCIe bus at a fixed 100MHz frequency.

steve-alexander: run a torrent app for 48+ hours straight and the NIC will lock up your system without fail.

steve-alexander · 05-02-2007, 01:57 PM

OK- the sky2 driver guy removed 88E8056 support from 2.6.21 & 2.6.21.1 but yesterdey he entered a patch that re-enabled 88E8056 support *but* it specifically checks for Gigabyte boards and rejects them. Apparently the problem only applies to Gigabyte implementations.

If you are running a 2.6.21 kernel and can't access the interface, then you can do the equivalent of the recent patch using the following script:

Quote:

#!/bin/bash

NEW_ID="`lspci -d 11ab:4364 -nm | cut -d' ' -f 3,4,6,7 | tr -d '"'`"
[ -z "$NEW_ID" ] && echo "No Marvell 88E8056 device is present" && exit

SUBVENDOR="`echo ${NEW_ID} | cut -d' ' -f 3`"
[ "1158" = "$SUBVENDOR" ] && echo "Gigabyte not supported" && exit

modprobe sky2
echo $NEW_ID > /sys/bus/pci/drivers/sky2/new_id
echo "Marvell 88E8056 driver enabled"

If you gigabyte owners want to try too, you can comment out the seventh line like:

Quote:

# [ "1158" = "$SUBVENDOR" ] && echo "Gigabyte not supported" && exit

but expect crashes and data corruption.

nass · 05-08-2007, 06:28 PM

damn and im a 'proud' owner of a gigabyte m/b...
seriously im rather happy with the gigabyte m/bs so far.
but it just itches that this chip will just not work on the gb m/b's.
(i haven ot overclocked this system - not yet at least)

oh and btw i, too, work on a ASUS P5B-Deluxe at university. no problem there with the marvell 8056 chip and the sky2 driver..

i just hope they'll figure out the gigabyte problem soon.

jeenam · 05-08-2007, 07:50 PM

The sky2 module has been in development for over a year. It's been broken for a really long time. Buying and installing a GigE nic using a different chipset (intel, realtek) is probably a better solution if one is planning on running linux with a GigE network connection.

nass · 05-08-2007, 08:13 PM

yes i have read its been broken for more than a year. nevertheless i can't believe they will drop all attempts to correct it...

mwhincup · 06-10-2007, 12:18 PM

Hello

I too am able to use the net for longer than a couple of minutes. This is not long enough to do any online updates!!! I've done a recent install of OpenSuse 10.2 64 bit, which appears to have loaded the sky2 module. Doing a google search shows others are having similar problems (sometimes referred to as the timeout issue).

In the shutdown message I get a Marvell "tx timeout" or something.

Does anyone know if this problem has been fixed?

Core 2 Duo E4300
Gigabyte 965P-DS3P Rev 3.3 (Bios F5)
Marvell 8056 LAN Chipset.

erklaerbaer · 06-10-2007, 02:34 PM

you searched the forum, which is good!
you "hijacked" a thread, which is, as you may have guessed by now, not good!

best ask in a s.u.s.e forum

mwhincup · 06-16-2007, 06:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by erklaerbaer

you searched the forum, which is good!
you "hijacked" a thread, which is, as you may have guessed by now, not good!

best ask in a s.u.s.e forum

...I didn't mean to hijack any threads. Forget I mentioned the S word. I thought that kernel and drivers issues were common to all linux users.

The question is - has the problem been solved?

erklaerbaer · 06-16-2007, 06:56 PM

other distros usually include their own kernel patches, have other tools installed to cope with such problems.

anyways i don't know the answer and you would probably get better results when asking in the right forums

jeenam · 06-17-2007, 03:57 PM

Here's the gentoo thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...c-start-0.html

Apparently the module is still flakey. Using the Marvell sk98lin driver is a possible solution. The performance is as good as sky2 when it works, as far as I can tell.

HappyTux · 06-17-2007, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeenam

Here's the gentoo thread: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...c-start-0.html

Apparently the module is still flakey. Using the Marvell sk98lin driver is a possible solution. The performance is as good as sky2 when it works, as far as I can tell.

Mine was ok until I jumped my overclock up to 2.8ghz from 2.4 I wonder if the other people having problems are overclocking as well.