"Tx unit hang" in e1000 driver
Posted: Sat, 13 June 2009 | permalink | No comments
In the "blogging it so I don't forget about it" category, and also to try and give Google some hints, here's one from the vault I recently came across again...
Older e1000 chips (specifically the 82573(V/L/E)) have firmware which enables the (buggy) power management functionality in the chips. Although this shouldn't occur with hardware shipped in the last several years (the updated firmware was released ages ago), I just came across it recently in a supposedly-new server, so who knows what's going on there...
The problem manifests itself as flaky or unstable network performance, combined with the kernel / log messages:
Detected Tx Unit Hang NETDEV WATCHDOG: ethX: transmit timed out
The fix is as described in the "82573(V/L/E) TX Unit Hang Messages" section of the Intel Linux driver documentation for the e1000 driver. The reason I'm blogging about it is that the top Google results point to either the now-dead e1000.sf.net wiki (which used to have all the necessary info, but now doesn't), or else forum posts which point to the now-dead e1000.sf.net wiki. Either way, it's not trivial to find a working location for the fix, so... linky love time!
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