I've had a lot of those messages come up with the tlp driver, dating all the way
back to 1.4.  I've stopped using those cards...I use ex and sip cards instead.  I
was getting 'transmit underrun' or 'stray interrupt' too, and I was hoping that it
would be fixed, but it never did.  Nevertheless, the NICs still worked after those
messages, but any "green" message on my terminal makes me suspicious.

Once upon a time Matthias Buelow said:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've got some SMC card (DECchip 21140A Ethernet) and it's giving
> me some "issues":
>
> First, at boot, the driver seems to note some brokenness
> in the card:
> tlp0: broken MicroWire interface detected; setting SROM size to 1Kb
>
> is this normal?
>
> Then I get the following:
>
> tlp0: transmit underrun; new threshold: 96/256 bytes
> tlp0: transmit underrun; new threshold: 128/512 bytes
> tlp0: transmit underrun; new threshold: 160/1024 bytes
> tlp0: transmit timeout
> (several of the transmit timeouts over time, although the card
> seems to continue to work.)
>
> Previously, I've also seen the following:
>
> Apr 30 11:58:01 pestbus /netbsd: tlp0: transmit process failed to idle: state
> RUNNING - FETCH
> Apr 30 11:58:01 pestbus /netbsd: tlp0: receive process failed to idle: state RUNNING
> - FETCH
> [ad infinitum]
>
> at which time networking was down and I had the machine rebooted.
>
> I googled a bit and found a posting that mentioned it could
> be that APM/ACPI powers down the card after a while and so I disabled
> power management in the BIOS as far as possible and haven't seen
> the above lockup yet again.  I don't know for sure if that has been
> the cause, though.
>
> My question is, have others seen these troubles?  Could the issue be
> resolved by using the de driver instead of the tlp one?
>
> --
> Matthias Buelow
> home: mkb/at/mukappabeta.de
> uni:  mkb/at/informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
>