On Fri, Dec 18, 1998 at 09:48:10AM +1100, Robert Elz wrote:
> No, it wouldn't.   Please let me say this once again.   A lance "overflow"
> error occurs entirely within one packet.

Oh.  Sorry.

> What does make a difference is how much contention there is on the memory
> bus - which cannot be other packets (the lance can only receive or transmit
> a single packet at a time), but could be (but apparently isn't in this
> particular case) other devices competing for DMA cycles, or it could just
> be the CPU competing for memory - doing a lot of X screen updates (drawing
> into video memory) could do it, as could just regular program accesses to
> ram, if they're missing the cache.

Uh, Ethernet DMA has a lower access priority to RAM than the CPU?  What
good does DMA do then in the first place? :)  How about the SCSI controller
in SS1/SS1+ - does it use DMA?

  -jm