Problems; Anyone using Via VT6122 Gigabit NIC in FC3?

[James Pifer]

On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 07:50, James Pifer wrote:
> I've been struggling with this for a couple weeks now. At first I
> thought it was just performance issues, but it got much worse than that.
> I have two FC3 machines and one XP machine with this card. 
> 
> My first FC3 machine started acting unstable right away. Constant
> lockups after being a stable machine for as long as I can remember. The
> 2nd FC3 machine seemed ok at first, but then it crashed hard with bus
> errors. At first I thought the hard drive crashed coincidentally, but
> upon further investigation the NIC appears to be causing the problems.
> My XP machine has shown no indications of foul play, other than the
> typical stuff of course, ;-).
> 
> The first problem I found with the NIC is that it's physically difficult
> to install. I was testing it on a different machine and the connectors
> were not making a good connection and I couldn't even boot the machine.
> The end bracket is to far away from the circuit board. So I fiddled a
> little with the it and was able to get the bracket to give a little more
> space. Then I was able to install the card. I installed ubuntu on the
> machine and it found the card and seemed to work fine. 
> 
> Unfortunately this is not real good evidence, since FC3 will work fine
> for a while too. Although I can make a certain symptom show up on
> demand. I put the card back into my FC3 Myth machine and configured it
> to be the primary card, and then unactiviated the onboard 10/100 NIC in
> FC3. If I try to watch a recorded show from a remote frontend the show
> plays for a minute or two and then bombs with the error:
> WriteBlock(): Aborting WriteBlock, write to socket failed!
> 
> If I unactivate the Via card and re-activate the onboard 10/100 then
> everything works fine again. I could try switching PCI slots, but I only
> have three slots and my PVR350 and PVR250 are each taking one. I'm
> skeptical whether that would help unless someone thinks that it really
> could.
> 
> I'm running these kernels on the FC3 machine:
> 2.6.10-1.770_14.rhfc3.at	(less stable, lockups)
> 2.6.10-1.737_FC3	(Myth machine, seems slightly more stable)
> 
> Does this tell me it's a driver problem since both NICs are physically
> still in the machine and enabled in the BIOS? 
> 
> Any suggestions based on this information?
> 
> Any help is appreciated. 
> James

<bump>

Can anyone comment on this issue?

Thanks,
James