Hello, I am desperately trying to get a reliable network
to function on a new Linux machine running RedHat 7.3.

I have:

eMachines T1742
Intel 845GL chipset
It has a builtin Realtek NIC: RTL8100B
Supposedly, this is compatible with a RTL8139.
It was detected as a Realtek 8139 and associated with the 8139too driver
(version 0.9.24).

I have connected this NIC with my new Linksys Wireless
Access Point Router with a 4-port switch (BEFW11S4).
That is connected to my Toshiba cable modem and I use RCN as my ISP.

If I attempt to download anything remotely large,
or run a program which sends and receives messages between other hosts on my LAN,
the network stalls (permanently). I have to manually restart the network (/etc/init.d/network restart)
or reboot to get it working again.

The only error message that I've seen was in /var/log/messages:
kernel: eth0: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0x0040.
(sometimes the IntrStatus is 0x0041, or 0x0001).

So far, I have tried:
a) upgrading the 8139too driver to 0.9.26
(downloaded from the gkernel project on sourceforge.net)
b) upgrading the 8139too driver to 1.0.1
(downloaded from the Realtek website_
c) installing an alternate network card - a real RTL8139D in a free PCI slot.
Unfortunately, that device was never seen,
even after I disabled the onboard LAN device
and also removed an unused PCI modem card.
Therefore, I removed the alternate NIC card and
reenabled the onboard NIC card.

I had hoped to make this thing work wirelessly;
but, that appears to be a distant possibility
if I can't even get it to work over ethernet.

Thanks for any help you can give me.
If there is any more information you want about my machine or setup,
please ask me (and perhaps tell me what command
to type to get that information).

Chuck

I am using 10baseT connections and cable.

I just noticed the following comment in 8139too.c:

Known Bugs / Errata / To-Do
12) 10base-T support flaky or slow (todo: verify this is still true)

Perhaps this is the source of my problems?

Should I get a different card so I can use a different network driver? If so, what card(s) do you recommend?

Thanks,
Chuck

1. Use a static IP address (not one from DHCP):

My boss told me that one of his friends had problems with DHCP
and that his network stopped because the client
automatically released a lease on an IP address
(for some reason). So, I tried assigning a static IP address
and not using DHCP at all. Unfortunately, that didn't work.

2. Try avoiding/working-around the error message "Too much work at interrupt"
by increasing the amount of work done at each interrupt (max_interrupt_work).

I just tried increasing that parameter to 128
(by adding "options 8139too max_interrupt_work=128"
to modules.conf). Unfortunately, that didn't work either.

3. Try hard coding the media type to 10mbps (rather than 100mbs) to try and slow it down
(since the other wireless hosts only go as fast as 11mbps and the internet connection only goes up to 1.5mbps).

Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure how to do this.
I know I want to set the 8139too driver option "media";
but, I don't know what the possible values are.

4. Try half-duplex instead of full-duplex.

Supposedly, some people had problems with Realtek network cards at full-duplex
that were solved by running them at half-duplex.
I don't know if this is a good idea or not - I'll try anything.
I see that there is another driver option called "full_duplex".
I imagine it should be set to 0 for half_duplex -
although the description seems to imply that you can set it between 1-8.

Thanks again,
Chuck

Chuck my reply would be to get a new card.

CNET makes some inexpensive linux cards around 12-14 US dollars.

Some better cards that I have used as well are Intel cards they seem to work great. 30-35 us dollars.

After searching around, I found that people had good luck with the NetGear FA311 card, so I went out and bought one yesterday and it seems to be working well. I just wish I could have gotten a wireless adapter instead.

Thanks,
Chuck

I posted this message many times for this error, I hope It can help you:


Hello. I fixed the problem. One of my computers, which is the router, had two (rtl 8139 chip) ethernet cards. They were using the same driver: 8139too.o

The error message: Too much work at interrupt, IntrStatus=0
, is coming from the driver 8139too

After a quick look at the source code, you can see that one of the functions can only be executed 20 times in a short time.

static int max_interrupt_work = 20;
int boguscnt = max_interrupt_work;
......
boguscnt--; // REMOVE -1 FROM BOGUSCNT
} while (boguscnt > 0);

if (boguscnt <= 0) {
printk (KERN_WARNING "%s: Too much work at interrupt, "
"IntrStatus=0x%4.4x.\n", dev->name, status);
......

Maybe the driver is wrongly coded.
I replaced one of the two cards. I have put a rtl 8029 chip card. So they aren't using the same driver.
Now everything work fine, no more error messages. And now I can upload faster than in the past. I was unable to upload faster than 2 kbytes/s when I was having the error message. Now it's at 103kbytes/s!

Sorry for my english, I speak french =)