Hello.

I have a system with five quad-port starfire (aic6915) cards.  After some
period of being up, it'll start printing "device timeout" messages for
some set of the interfaces (three or less, so far).  After a reboot,
the set of interfaces which complain will change.  There are about four
messages per minute per interface.  An example:
  Dec  6 00:22:05 smdls4 /netbsd: sf4: device timeout
  Dec  6 00:22:10 smdls4 /netbsd: sf1: device timeout
  Dec  6 00:22:11 smdls4 /netbsd: sf6: device timeout

What causes this?

I note that running a ping to a system reachable via a noisy interface
results in no more messages for that interface.

This system has a NetBSD-1.5-2 userland, and the kernel is:
NetBSD smdls4.sc.intel.com 1.5Y NetBSD 1.5Y (ecns) #3: Thu Nov  1 18:02:03 PST 2001     root@m6:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/ecns i386

Here's the dmesg output for one of the cards:

  pci1 at ppb0 bus 1
  pci1: i/o space, memory space enabled
  ppb1 at pci1 dev 1 function 0: Digital Equipment DECchip 21154 PCI-PCI Bridge (rev. 0x05)
  pci2 at ppb1 bus 2
  pci2: i/o space, memory space enabled
  sf0 at pci2 dev 4 function 0: ANA-62011 (rev 0) 10/100 Ethernet, rev. 3
  sf0: interrupting at irq 10
  sf0: Ethernet address 00:00:d1:ee:ef:2d
  sf0: 64-bit PCI slot detected
  sqphy0 at sf0 phy 1: Seeq 80220 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
  sqphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
  sf1 at pci2 dev 5 function 0: ANA-62011 (rev 0) 10/100 Ethernet, rev. 3
  sf1: interrupting at irq 9
  sf1: Ethernet address 00:00:d1:ee:ef:2e
  sf1: 64-bit PCI slot detected
  sqphy1 at sf1 phy 1: Seeq 80220 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
  sqphy1: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
  sf2 at pci2 dev 6 function 0: ANA-62011 (rev 0) 10/100 Ethernet, rev. 3
  sf2: interrupting at irq 11
  sf2: Ethernet address 00:00:d1:ee:ef:2f
  sf2: 64-bit PCI slot detected
  sqphy2 at sf2 phy 1: Seeq 80220 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
  sqphy2: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
  sf3 at pci2 dev 7 function 0: ANA-62011 (rev 0) 10/100 Ethernet, rev. 3
  sf3: interrupting at irq 7
  sf3: Ethernet address 00:00:d1:ee:ef:30
  sf3: 64-bit PCI slot detected
  sqphy3 at sf3 phy 1: Seeq 80220 10/100 media interface, rev. 1
  sqphy3: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

Thanks for any help....
-- Chuck