[ltp] Experience from updating RH 6.2 to RH 7.0 on TP 770X

[Burt Silverman/Raleigh/IBM]

Friedemann Baitinger      fb@baiti.net       http://baiti.net/fb/
>PS: when I insterted the Token Ring adapter first I got hundreds of
>messages like:

>  Nov  6 09:50:49 blackbox kernel: tr0: Arrg. Transmitter busy

>I then did a 'ifconfig tr0 down' and pulled/plugged the card and then
>the problem did not occur anymore. Can you shed some light into
>this? What does that message mean and what kind of problem does it
>indicate?

When an application wishes to send data, a dev->hard_start_xmit() routine
in the driver is called. This routine looks at a control flag dev->tbusy
and if it is set, you will see the Arrg message. So if you keep trying to
send messages and the device stays busy, you keep getting the messages.

Places that set tbusy: it is set when the card is first being initialized,
also a readlog routine in the driver. The Token Ring hardware can produce
log messages. So you were seeing the effect of someone trying to transmit
before initialization was complete - maybe something got out of whack and
the card wasn't going to come up so you just kept seeing the messages. In
the prior version of the driver, every time you reopened the driver the
initialization was called, so you would see these messages if you pulled a
cable. Now the initialization routine is only called at the beginning (for
example, after /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia start, or similarly after plugging
in the card).

The tbusy stuff is in the part of the driver that is common to PCMCIA and
non PCMCIA, but also shows up in the PCMCIA section. There is a chance the
logic is more complex than necessary; could be a good homework problem.

Burt

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